Emii Alrai

I approach a table of friends, it’s Friday afternoon, volunteer lunch, the most sociable point in the week at Platt Fields Market Garden, a community garden on a reclaimed bowling green in an otherwise densely urban part of South Manchester. ‘Do you wanna hear a poem about compost?’ Of course they do.

‘You have to have a measure of resilience to be in this game’, Zarah Hussain says. She is a visual artist and has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Barbican, V&A and the Southbank. Hussain has worked full-time as an artist for over a decade, but like many working in the industry, her formative years were spent balancing her practice with more steady employment such as teaching.

Material Poetries was a public conversation between Simone Fattal and Maggie O’Sullivan that took place in January 2022. Fattal is a sculptor and O’Sullivan a poet, but neither practice can be contained by simple labels. In conversation, they found common ground in ghosts, traces and echoes, despite working with very different base materials. In the creases of Simone Fattal’s clay forms, liturgies of the past sing in silence.