Coventry’s City of Culture year turned out to be a busy time for me, with several projects, commissions and collaborations. The pandemic struck in the run up to 2021, disrupting the year. Along the way, however, I managed to do a few fun things, including a Coventry Creates commission.

This was a pamphlet I produced in collaboration with Dr Charlotte Allender, an expert in seeds and gene cropping and, among other things, part of the UK Vegetable Seedbank (also on twitter).

Following a relatively free-form introduction and framework, I began drawing out vocabulary and ideas responding to Charlotte’s research into carrot genetic traits. There are a couple of videos on the site that give you an idea of what kind of material I was working with and the kind of process through which we arrived at a co-written (and indistinct) set of poems about carrots, food security, supermarket/capitalist retail exclusion zones and a certain cartoon rabbit.

Alongside the pamphlet, which you can download from and read online at Coventry Creates, I produced a series of postcards as an optional physical copy of the project. I will probably post more thoroughly about the serial form the project took – Parchment Scalpel Rock – and which I’ve been working on for about 15 years now.

But enough to say that the parts are designed to be read in any order, so looseleaf is my preferred publication method. Unfortunately, the font I used for the postcards ended up squashed by the PDF saving process, which has made them a bit difficult to read. I may get around to re-editing them at some point, in which case I’ll add them somewhere on the site.