Talk | The Making of Poetry: Adam Nicolson & Tom Hammick in Conversation

Join writer Adam Nicolson and artist Tom Hammick in conversation with Pallant House Gallery Chief Curator Melanie Vandenbrouck, to celebrate Hammick’s print series on view in the Print Room at Pallant House Gallery (14 August – 25 October).

Adam and Tom will reflect on a remarkable creative journey: a shared return to the revolutionary year of 1797–98, when William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived and worked in the Quantock Hills. That intense period gave rise to poems including Lyrical Ballads, The Ancient Mariner and Tintern Abbey - works that reshaped the English imagination.

Following the poets’ letters and journals day by day, Nicolson retraced their paths, walking the same hills at dawn and dusk, immersing himself in the same shifting light, weather and darkness. Alongside him, Hammick created a series of powerful woodcuts, ‘suspended between the actual and the imagined’, as visual accompaniments to Nicolson’s book The Making of Poetry (2019).

Their conversation will chart this process of immersion and collaboration, exploring how landscape can become a living force in art.

This talk is part of our September Late event. By purchasing this talk ticket you also gain free access to our galleries, exhibitions and drop-in activities from 5–8.30pm.