a webzine for shifting times

The Future Machine is a magical device created via a series of conversations with artists and citizens across England. As the name suggests, the creation looks ahead, aiming to help address an uncertain future on a planet in crisis. Its interactive technology allows stories to be recorded and printed on the spot from the words of participant viewers. These narratives are intended to help individuals imagine creative ways to address  global climate change.

Carole Satyamurti, prolific poet,writer, academic and winner of the 1986 National Poetry Prize, died on her 80th birthday in August 2019. This is a tribute to a woman of huge compassion and overarching intellect.

Brushes and paint are my weapons of choice.  Visual images, lodged in the brain’s right hemisphere, have a reassuring clarity and permanence, particularly when given physical form on canvas.  I can spend months wrestling with a painting; it may not ever work in the way I’d hoped. But some paintings make it through to independence, bearing authentic witness to particular moments in time.   

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This is one of my first attempts using words to discuss my work.  I returned to full-time painting in 2004, after a career teaching Art History, latterly at the University of East London. What fascinates me about  artworks from the past (from yesterday backwards) is the physical evidence they provide of other minds at work.

Andy Croft runs the T-junction international poetry festival, the Ripon poetry festival and Smokestack Books (www.smokestack-books.co.uk). His latest collection, The Sailors of Ulm is due from Shoestring Press in March.