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The 27th recipient of The Creatives Grant is Sean Prentice, a writer with a background in visual art and oral histories. Over email, the writer sent us a collection of poems that we felt in our gut. The poems seemed full of names from his own life, past and present. They were characterful without being patronising or coming off as a parody; characterful in a knowing, studied way that manages to captures the twang of someone’s personality in so few words. Sean has a background in visual art and oral histories, and much of his work deals with the intersections of class, disability, and place with memoire and personal biography as the starting point. All of that comes through with pure lucidity in the work, so be sure to follow Sean’s Instagram for more.
BIO: I was born in 1966, raised in Northamptonshire and presently live in Herefordshire with my partner and our soon to be teenage daughter. My father was born in rural Ireland in 1916. His father in 1880. I come from a long line of blacksmiths, farm labourers, steelworkers, spiritualists, mediums, and bare knuckle prize fighters and have a background in contemporary visual arts and also history writing. My past work which has encompassed film, performance, embroidery, drawing, and sculptural forms as well as text art has more often than not centred around issues of class and disability - the spaces we are given and the spaces we take for ourselves - from an autobiography starting point. My most recent texts, which find themselves in the form of poems, seek to explore and memorialise uncelebrated and overlooked working class lives, began as a way to negotiate and possibly heal psychic trauma which exists in my ancestral line. I began with the confused narratives passed down within my own family - the kind of stories and fragmented histories which exist in all families - lists of names, dates, places, occupations - half remembrances which have a limited life span and are destined to become unanchored, emptied of meaning unless they are saved, and given life and context. What at first seemed to be a collection of random glimpses that I was trying to make sense of as a whole have perhaps ended up as a series of gaps and absences, pockets waiting to be filled.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sean_prentice/
