Raymond Antrobus is a poet and educator. His diverse work ranges from sign language to video. He explores hearing, heritage and a search for ‘missing sounds’ by drawing on vernacular speech, multi-cultural histories and the physiology of listening. Heather Phillipson is an artist and poet. She works across sculpture, video, music, drawing and digital media. Her ‘quantum thought experiments’ explore our entanglement in ecosystems and the fragility of our ideas about them. Together, they discussed ‘the body’ as a locus for speaking, writing, feeling, listening and making.

Each Public Event was an open conversation. So we could start those conversations with some shared understanding of how each speaker has explored the cross-overs between sculpture and poetry in relation to their event's topic, we asked them to suggest a recent project for preparatory watching/reading/listening.

Heather Phillipson suggested her audio-collage Volta, which accompanied her Fourth Plinth commission in Trafalgar Square, London, 2020:

Raymond Antrobus suggested an experimental documentary about closed captions, which he made for the BBC Radio 4 series 'Inventions in Sound' in 2021:

Click here to watch an expanded audio-visual version of the documentary via iPlayer (UK residents only), courtesy of the BBC.