Chichester academic launches new book of elegies in collaboration with ‘Death Positive’ creative practitioners
University of Chichester academic Dr Naomi Foyle (pictured above) will collaborate with visual artists to launch her collection of poetic elegies ‘Salt & Snow’, at an event which will open up healthy and inclusive conversations about death and dying.
The free event by The Chichester Centre for Critical and Creative Writing, takes place on Monday, 28 April, and will be held at the Cloisters at the Bishop Otter Campus, University of Chichester, from 4pm to 5pm.
Naomi’s fourth poetry collection Salt & Snow (Waterloo Press, 2025) is a triptych of personal and collective elegies, an interwoven meditation on grief, witness, whiteness and climate crisis, and an on-going opportunity for creative collaboration and community building. Chaired by Professor of Literature and the Environment Hugh Dunkerley, the campus celebration of the book features a poetry reading and a screening of the film poem ‘Ways of Seeing Trees: in memory of John Berger’, directed by visual artist Wendy Pye, with a Hindustani Raag composed and performed by writer/musician Razia Aziz (pictured right). Wendy and Razia will discuss their collaboration with Naomi, which emerges from their backgrounds in, respectively, film and photography; and music, song, spoken word and creative writing. Also present will be visual artist Dagmara Rudkin of Sacred Wings Shrouds, presenting her bespoke burial shrouds (pictured below).
Wendy and Dagmara, co-directors of Brighton arts organisation Luna Arts, will also talk about their current Arts Council England funded project to open up conversations about death and dying. The project is part of the wider ‘Death Postive’ movement which seeks to break the British culture of silence around the subject of death.
The Luna Arts project includes work in hospices and their recent Making Space residency at Fabrica Gallery, Brighton, which involved poetry workshops and a reading by Naomi at a multimedia Death Salon involving various artists sharing work on the theme of death, dying and grief. Intersecting with the Death Positive movement and grounded in her own decolonial and inclusive practice, Razia’s previous work in this area includes the multilingual soundscape Chalé Gayé, commissioned by Witness Stand for performance at the Chattri monument in the South Downs at Brighton Festival 2022, and by Brighton Dome as part of the Reveal project funded by the Heritage Fund.
Naomi said: “The poems in Salt & Snow emerged over a long period of mourning significant personal losses, compounded by my grief over world events including war crimes, genocide and climate crisis. Grief, of course, can be a very lonely feeling, but the reaction to the book so far has proved to me the truth of the adage that ‘a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved’. My collaborations with Wendy, Dagmara and Razia have encouraged my belief that artists have a powerful role to play in fostering empathy, inclusivity, justice and hope in our frightening and polarised times.”
‘Ways of Seeing Trees’ was funded by the University of Chichester Research Innovation Fund and Arts Council England, in grants that include the production of a second film poem, ‘Salt, Snow, Earth’, to be completed by June.
Photographs in order of appearance: Naomi Foyle; Razia Aziz singing (Credit: Anuja Sharma); Dagmara Rudkin with shroud (Credit: Sacred Wings Shrouds); book cover for Salt & Snow.
