An Interview With Meliors Simms

Meliors Simms is a contemporary landscape artist, radical crafter, a science fiction poet and an old-school blogger. She makes icebergs, islands and even whole continents from vintage blankets, wool and thread. Her sculptures look like cuddly landscape features yet carry serious environmental messages about the impacts of our everyday choices on the world around us. This August she is exhibiting art about mining in Melbourne and about Antarctica in Hamilton, where she will be reading poetry as well.

Meliors’ poem Ponting’s Genius was the Tuesday Poem on my blog this week.

The photo above shows Meliors with a work called Sastrugi. Photo by Jody Saturday

Meliors, a simple question, but one that may have a complex answer: why are you so interested in Antarctica?

It is mysterious, dangerous, vulnerable and beautiful. The lack of flora and fauna (and pigments) focus our attention onto patterns and textures of snow and ice, sky and sea which I find very exciting to interpret visually. Its short, intense human history and its long, surprising natural history both provide thrilling stories that bear endless iterations. And ultimately at this distance, it’s a blank canvas for the imagination.

If you had the chance to visit Antarctica, would you?

Um, this is tricky, because if I was offered an opportunity to go I would probably accept. But really I’m ambivalent. On one hand it would be amazing, inspiring and unlike anything else I could do. But on the other hand Antarctica is an incredibly vulnerable environment about which I am intensely concerned. I don’t think Antarctica needs me as just another tourist, although I’m willing to be persuaded that I might have something of value to offer in exchange for a free ticket.

I spend a huge amount of time thinking about Antarctica and my imagination seems adequately fed through second hand sources. The compliments about my work that I treasure the most are from people who have spent time in Antarctica, who tell me I’ve captured the essence of the place.

And besides, its jolly cold and a bit scary down there.

You are both an artist and a poet, and for the Imagining Antarctica exhibition in Hamilton, you are giving a poetry reading / artist’s talk as well as exhibiting visual art. How do the practice of art and the practice of poetry work side by side – and for that matter, how on Earth do you find the time to do both?

The Imagining Antarctica exhibition at ArtsPost

Ha! I don’t really find time to do both. The past months of intensely preparing my exhibitions has been a poetry drought. Writing seems to be woven through my creative life in an irregular abstract way rather than as a disciplined practice. There are times when I write a lot, but more times when I write little or nothing. Last year was very productive though, and most of the poems I wrote then relate to the art I am showing now, hence the poetry reading and artist talk event.

Reading and looking at the entries on your excellent blog, I am struck by the hours and hours of work that goes into creating them. Can you describe your process of making them, such as the icebergs?

Most of the work I make these days starts with an old woven wool blanket which I cut into contour pieces. I needle felt each layer with a nice plump cover of unspun wool and then attach the layers together using blanket stitch. The icebergs are three dimensional, sculptural pieces so there’s a lot of layers and a lot of needle felting to get the three-dimensionality.

I use a similar technique to make wall relief pieces which may use only a couple of layers of blanket and little or no felting, but can be much bigger and even more time consuming to make. My biggest work, ‘My Antarctica’ a scale relief map of the entire continent, took me about eight months to make. I can make a little iceberg in a week.

Meliors standing in front of My Antarctica. Photo: Marion Manson (ArtsPost)

Over time I have perversely chosen to make my stitching cruder (even though hundreds of hours of practice has made me a better stitcher). I want my work to look unmistakably handmade. With some of my earlier embroidered pieces viewers would assume it was machine stitched, and I decided I didn’t want any ambiguity about that. I ‘d rather have people saying ‘I could make that’ and so to consider what it means to stitch something by hand. I want people to contemplate the hours and hours that go into my making.

Why did you choose the craft medium, and these crafts in particular, to make your artworks (and, does the wording of that question imply a dichotomy that doesn’t or shouldn’t exist?)

Contemporary art is a very broad field in which there are lots of interesting craft practices to be seen. I choose craft as my means of creative expression both for the pleasure and the meaning of my making. Slow meditative hand stitching is very sensual and satisfying. By choosing hand made rather than machine made, and doing it myself rather than farming the work out to low paid women in Asia, my work implicitly critiques the economic as well as environmental impacts of industrialised consumerist culture.

You were recently in Melbourne for the opening of the “F**k Your Donation” exhibition, which includes your installation “Spoil”. How was that experience, and is this part of a continuing involvement in the Australian arts scene?

Meliors’ installation “Spoil” at “F**k Your Donation”

Melbourne is a fantastic city for the arts, and especially for craft practices in contemporary art. It is a real thrill to show in a gallery there for the first time, and have such an enthusiastic response to my work. I hope to go back for more soon.

One thing I know we have in common is our love for Kim Stanley Robinson’s writing, and in particular his Mars trilogy. What’s so great about those books?

Well, KSR’s novel Antarctica turned me into a fan of Antarctica as well as speculative fiction when I first read it some 15 years ago. That book, and the Mars and Washington trilogies resonate with me as extremely plausible near-future-histories that aren’t dystopias. I like his strong, complex female characters; frustratingly rare in the genre. I reread all seven novels reasonably regularly and I appreciate the detail as well as the broad sweep of his vision. But mostly because he’s very good at making it seem possible that we 21st century humans could dig ourselves out of the dreadful mess our species has created, and I often feel the need for that spark of hope.

KSR’s writing has had a huge influence on my visual, textile arts. For example I’ve turned again and again to his descriptions of the textures and colours of Antarctica as I’ve stitched. He’s a wonderfully visual writer. In more direct homage, I once made a series of small embroidered ‘Mars gardens’, visualising the greening of the red planet as practised by Sax Russell and others in his trilogy.

Three of Meliors’ “Mars Gardens”, after Kim Stanley Robinson

Do you have any writing projects on the go that are separate from your art projects, and how do you see the balance between your art and your poetry developing in the future?

Right now I don’t have any particular writing projects. Rather, I’m content to let occasional poems arise spontaneously, most often in very close relationship to the visual art I’m working on, particularly at the early, conceptual stages.

Are there particular artists and poets whose work you enjoy that you’d like to encourage readers of this interview to check out?

I’m pretty excited about sculptors Ruth Asawa (http://www.ruthasawa.com/) and Mandy Greer (http://stonemandy.wordpress.com/). I also recommend the photographs of Edward Burtynsky (http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/), and the fantastic video about his work called Manufactured Landscapes. Two of the poets I am enjoying most at the moment are Janis Freegard and Bernadette Hall.

Where people can see Meliors’ work

Tuesday Poem: Ponting’s Genius, by Meliors Simms

 

Ponting’s genius was in his cruel portraits
of heroes on their improbable returns.
Emaciated bodies invisible inside the ice armour
of clothes unchanged for many months.
Hollow eyes, blank, bleak, utterly spent;
dirty desperate faces that have looked straight at death
and now gaze without flinching upon the camera.
What is this few more minutes of relief denied, delayed,
after endless weeks of scurvied sledging on frostbitten feet.

Never has a photographer been less loved by his subjects
than Ponting, pointing his slow Edwardian shutter
at men on the verge of respite,
men looking over his shoulder towards warmth and safety,
already smelling the cocoa and toast of their fantasies.
Men still to be cut out of frozen solid garments
whose health will never fully recover from the ordeal
they have only just survived.
The death in those heroes’ stares
is murderous.

Credit note: “Ponting’s Genius” won the Wintec open poetry prize in 2010, and is reproduced as a Tuesday Poem by permission of Wintec.

Tim says: Meliors is someone I admire a great deal – not just for such fine poems as these, but for the hard work she puts into her art, for the fantastic results she produces, and for her dedication to her artistic career. She is also a really neat person.

You can find out a lot more about Meliors, her art, and her fascination with Antarctica in my interview with her, which I’m aiming to run on Thursday – as long as I get all the great images she’s sent to accompany the interview sorted out in time!

And just in case any stray cricket fans are wondering … the “Ponting” of this poem is not Ricky Ponting, that gimlet-eyed little Aussie battler from Launceston, but Herbert George Ponting, the photographer who accompanied Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica in 1910-11 – and, as far as I know, no relation of the more recent Ricky.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog – the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week’s other poems are linked from the right-hand column.

Tuesday Poem: Two Kinds of Time, by Meliors Simms

Two Kinds of Time

In some universes
time is experienced as linear.
Individuals move through their lives
cutting a track into their possibilities
and paving it into permanence behind them.
Aware only of the winding road they have chosen,
looking backwards down the line from now to birth
looking forward into the obscure thicket of the future
sometimes, peripherally aware of a bare hint
of what if’s as what isn’t.

In some universes
time is experienced as a plane.
Beings move around their existence
as an intimate landscape
treading and retreading every possibility.
Learning their lives as a farmer learns her land,
choosing every choice
exploring every opening,
until through preference
a rut is worn in the familiar
a dwelling in just one favourite moment or cycle of moments
a resting place from their endless wanderings.

When you sleep
these universes meet in your dreams.
Time leaks across the boundaries
so you can know a little
of the strange ways of linearity or planearity;
whichever is most unfamiliar to you.

Tim says:

Meliors Simms’ “Two Kinds of Time” is one of the more philosophical poems that Mark Pirie and I included in Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand.

Mark and I weren’t the only ones to recognise its virtues: “Two Kinds of Time” was nominated in the Best Short Poem category of the annual Rhysling Awards for the best speculative poetry of 2009, and is therefore included in the 2010 Rhysling Anthology, published by the Science Fiction Poetry Association.

The Rhysling award winners have just been announced – congratulations to the winners and placegetters – and “Two Kinds of Time” was not among them, but it’s still a great tribute to Meliors and to this poem that it was selected for inclusion in the anthology.

Voyagers cover

You can buy Voyagers from Amazon.com as a paperback or Kindle e-book, or from New Zealand Books Abroad, or Fishpond.

You can also find out more about Voyagers, and buy it directly from the publisher, at the Voyagers mini-site.

Find lots more Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog.

Five Blogs I Like. Chapter 1: The First Five

A week or so ago, writer Debbie Cowens very kindly nominated me for a Prolific Blogger Award, as part of which, all the nominees are invited to nominate seven prolific bloggers of their own.

Although I decided not to go down the Prolific Blogger route (because I’m, like, a rebel), it did remind me that I’d fallen out of the habit of posting here about other blogs I enjoy reading, even if I don’t catch up with them as often as I’d like. So I’ve decided to institute a semi-regular series called “Five Blogs I Like”.

Some of my favourite bloggers are far more prolific than I, while others maintain a posting average of about once a month. You’ll find all sorts in here, and they won’t all be writing blogs, or New Zealand blogs – but in this first instalment, I’m going to feature five New Zealand writing blogs I have liked ever since I first set on eyes on them.

Helen Rickerby: Winged Ink. Helen is a fine poet, a publisher, and a person who always has interesting things to say. Her blog was one of those I modelled “Books In The Trees” on when I began it, and the other such blog was …

Harvey Molloy: Notebook. This blog features news of Harvey’s life, thoughts on poetry & existence, and now and then some of his wonderful poems, like this one: After New Year.

Kay McKenzie Cooke: made for weather. Kay is one of my favourite poets. Her work has an added appeal for me because it’s often about Southland, the province I grew up in and often write about in my own poetry. Not only that, but she illustrates it with great photos as well.

Meliors Simms: Bibliophilia. Meliors is very talented as both a poet and an artist, with her work recently having been a finalist for a national arts prize. Plus, Antarctic art, and discussions of Kim Stanley Robinson!

Graham Beattie: Beatties Book Blog. This blog, which Graham Beattie updates several times a day – he truly deserves the title of Prolific Blogger – is a trade journal for the New Zealand publishing industry, from beneath the surface of which literary disputes occasionally burst into the open. It’s an essential resource for working writers in New Zealand.

Poem From Voyagers Nominated For International Poetry Award

Meliors Simms’ poem “Two Kinds of Time”, first published in Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand, which I co-edited with Mark Pirie, has been nominated for the Rhysling Awards, the international awards for speculative (science fiction, fantasy and horror) poetry. We thought that was well worth a press release, and here it is!

New Zealand poem nominated for international award

Meliors Simms’ poem “Two Kinds of Time”, first published in the acclaimed anthology “Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand” (Interactive Press, 2009), has been nominated for a Rhysling Award for the best science fiction, fantasy or horror poem published in 2009.

The Rhysling Awards, administered by the Science Fiction Poetry Association, were inaugurated in 1978. Among previous winners are such well-known writers as Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jane Yolen and Joe Haldeman.

“I’m honoured to have my poem nominated for an international poetry award with such an illustrious history,” said Meliors Simms from her home in Hamilton. “I had never heard of the genre of science fiction poetry until I was invited to submit to the Voyagers anthology a few years ago. ‘Two Kinds of Time’ was my first effort and marked a shift in my writing style from introspective to more ideas-based poetry.”

Tim Jones, who co-edited Voyagers with Mark Pirie, said “We are delighted for Meliors, and very pleased for this further recognition for New Zealand science fiction poetry and for Voyagers. The anthology has been very well-received in New Zealand, and it has already appeared on the NZ Listener and New Zealand Herald best books lists for 2009. The international interest in the anthology, and in Meliors’ poem in particular, is just as exciting.”

Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand is available from leading New Zealand independent bookstores. It is also available online from Interactive Press, from Fishpond (NZ) and from Amazon.com.

Links

Meliors Simms has made a short video called “Non Linear Time”, which features one section of her nominated poem “Two Kinds of Time”. It can be viewed on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIAkJVQ064o

Meliors’ web site is at http://www.meliors.net

For more information about the Rhyslings, please visit http://www.sfpoetry.com/rhysling.html

The Voyagers website is at http://ipoz.biz/Titles/Voy.htm

Voyagers received a very positive review in Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. That interview is available online at http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/2009/08/voyagers-gets-great-first-review.html

How To Buy Voyagers

In New Zealand

  • Directly from me. I now have a limited number of copies for sale for NZ $28 plus $2 p&p. If you’d like one, please email senjmito@gmail.com with your address and preferred payment method.
  • From an increasing range of bookshops, including (but not limited to) Unity Books (Wellington and Auckland), Books a Plenty in Tauranga, Bruce MacKenzie Books in Palmerston North, Madras Cafe Books in Christchurch, and the University Book Shop in Dunedin.
  • From Fishpond.

Worldwide

USA only

Voyagers Gets A Great First Review

The Wellington launch of Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand is next Monday at the New Zealand Poetry Society meeting, Thistle Inn, 7.30pm. The wonderful Meliors Simms passed on to me the first review of Voyagers, and I’m so happy with it that I’ve reproduced it below.

Review of Voyagers from Star*Line, Journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, May/June 2009, p. 19. Reviewed by Edward Cox.

Science fiction is a fertile ground for poetry. As easily as snapping fingers, it seems, imagery and ideas can kick the thought processes of readers into overdrive. The very mention of words like ‘galaxy’, ‘sky’, ‘Earth’, and ‘alien’, ‘robot’, ‘human’, can fill the imagination with all kinds of possibilities. With Voyagers, editors Mark Pirie and Tim Jones have gathered together some of New Zealand’s finest poets to compile a collection that shows us all why the realm of science fiction poetry knows no bounds.

The book is divided into six parts, with titles drawn from popular culture: “Back to the Future”, “Apocalypse Now”, “Altered States”, “ET”, “When Worlds Collide” and “The Final Frontier”. As these titles suggest, each part comes at science fiction from a different angle. In the introduction, the editors acknowledge that there is no universal definition for the genre, and with this in mind, all the poems herein are thought provoking, enigmatic and entertaining.

Janet Charman’s “in your dreams” is a nice reminder of where we are, and that all the poems in the book are by Girls and Boys from New Zealand. “Einstein’s Theory Simply Explained” by David Gregory is anything but simple, while Alistair Te Ariki Campbell’s “Looking at Kapiti” uses classic literature and Maori history to describe the destruction of an island. Without doubt, the most humorous poem of the collection is “Tabloid Headlines” by Helen Rickerby. This one is a list of headlines, which sometimes invert expectancies or carry quotes that will have you chuckling long after reading. The best headline, perhaps, is of the woman who walked on water, who then explained, “No I’m not the messiah, I’m just very clever.”

My favourite poem in Voyagers is also the very last poem in the book. “Space & Time” by Brian [sic] Sewell returns us to possibilities, fuelling the imagination, the heart of this collection. On one hand, the poem seems to wonder how far the human race can be trusted with space exploration and colonisation, given its history. On the other hand, it is a poem of imagery and ideas, adventure and peril, which opens in the way perhaps all great science fiction should:

a long time ago
in a galaxy far far away
are things that we know
and things that amaze—

Although Voyagers is a strong collection in its entirety, the bok is undoubtedly at its strongest when its source is New Zealand itself, and is often an education. For most, we only know this country from the stunning landscapes Mr Jackson showed us in the “The Lord of the Rings” movies. We tend to forget that New Zealand is a land of diverse cultures, mysticism and deep folklore. Editors Pirie and Jones have produced a collection that is an antidote to ignorance. The authors and their works have tapped into a fertile ground to ensure Voyagers is most worthy of note.

There will be copies of Voyagers available for sale at the meeting, but if you’re not going to be there and would like a copy, you can buy Voyagers from Amazon.com as a paperback or Kindle e-book; New Zealand Books Abroad; or Fishpond. You can also find out more about Voyagers, and buy it directly from the publisher, at the Voyagers mini-site.

UPDATE: My interview on Plains FM with Helen Lowe about Voyagers is now available as a podcast: http://bit.ly/9mxI3 (12 minutes)

Voyagers for Sale, Stand Up Poetry, Online Voting for the Vogels, and James Dignan’s New Exhibition

Voyagers for Sale

Mark Pirie and I are still waiting for the contributors’ and review copies of Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand to make their way to the shores of Aotearoa, so we can start sending them out. But it is already possible to buy – or at least order – Voyagers online, as follows:

  • From Amazon.com as a paperback or Kindle e-book (search for “Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry”)
  • From Fishpond in New Zealand.
  • From the publisher, via the Voyagers mini-site which also has information about and excerpts from the book.

And a poem from Voyagers has already gone cross-platform! (That sounds good – I hope it makes sense.) Meliors Simms has produced a video version of part of her poem “Two Kinds of Time”, which appears in the anthology. You can see it and read about it on Meliors’ blog, and also see it as part of Helen Rickerby’s initiative, NZ Poets on Video. It’s well worth watching.

Get Up, Stand Up

I will be the featured reader at Stand Up Poetry at Palmerston North City Library on Wednesday 3 June at 7pm. Helen Rickerby was the May reader, and it sounds like she had a great time; Harvey Molloy is reading in August; if someone can tell me who’s reading in July, I’ll mention them too. I’m looking forward to it – come along if you are in the Palmerston North area and hear my repertoire of anecdotes for the first time!

UPDATE: As Helen Lehndorf has reminded me, and I should have remembered, Glenn Colquhoun is the June reader. Helen Heath will be reading in September.

Online Voting for the Vogels

The Sir Julius Vogel Awards, New Zealand’s equivalent of the Hugo Awards, will be awarded at ConScription, this year’s National Science Fiction Convention, being held in Auckland at Queen’s Birthday Weekend. There’s a very strong field of finalists, and yours truly has two finalists (Transported and JAAM 26) in the field for Best Collected Work.

Members of ConScription and of SFFANZ, the administering body, are eligible to vote – and if you join SFFANZ (it costs $10 per annum) you can vote online until 27 May 2009. I encourage you to do so.

James Dignan’s New Exhibition

Dunedin artist and reviewer James Dignan has his fifth solo exhibition, “The Unguarded Moment”, at the Temple Gallery, 29 Moray Place, Dunedin from May 15-28, with the opening this Friday (the 15th) from 5.30-7.30pm. I recommend it! You can find out more about the exhibition, James’s art, music and writing, and his past exhibitions on his website.

Blogs in Their Summer Clothes – 1

I link to a number of writers’ and artists’ blogs. You can find those links nestled down in the left-hand column of this page, under the Blog Archive, but I thought it was time I gave some of them a bit more prominence. So here’s five presented, as they say in Hollywood, “For Your Consideration”.

In a subsequent post, I’ll look at some more blogs, and at a discontinued New Zealand literary site that still speaks, from time to time, from a little to the east and somewhere beyond the veil.

When I started work on “Books in the Trees”, there were two existing blogs I turned to as role models: Harvey Molloy’s Notebook and Helen Rickerby’s Winged Ink.

Harvey and I have a number of things in common: we’re both poets, we both hail from the north of England, and we both write science fiction poetry. Not surprisingly, we’re friends! Harvey’s blog, with its mixture of news, writing and reviews, continues to be an inspiration.

Helen Rickerby, also a friend, is a poet, publisher, and encyclopedist. One of the things she publishes is JAAM, the Wellington literary magazine of which I’m editing Issue 26. Helen also runs Seraph Press, which publishes a (so far) small range of exceptionally handsome books.

Helen also plays a valuable role in encouraging her associate, the mysterious Giant Sparrow, to grace the blogosphere more frequently. Giant Sparrow is a deep thinker and fine writer with an enduring faith in the existence of places where anything is possible, such as the theatre.

Finally in this instalment, two bloggers whose blogging forte is a synthesis of words and images. I have known Meliors Simms for a long time, even though we go for many years without seeing each other. She combines visual art and poetry in her arresting and beautiful handmade books, and her Bibliophilia blog showcases the combination.

On the other hand, I don’t believe I’ve ever met Kay McKenzie Cooke, but we both have strong connections with Southland, Dunedin, and their wildlife and landscapes. She’s a fine poet, photographer and excellent blogger with an an output — and range of blogs – that puts mine to shame. Her as it happens blog is a good place to start.

So there’s a few blogs I like. But there’s more! Check them out at the left of this page, or look out for my next post about the blogs I link to. They may be wearing autumn clothes by then.