So the clay tablet project, which I have chosen to title Tide, isn’t done yet, or at least it needs to be redone, at least in part, and it’s being folded Russian Doll-fashion into the next project I’ll be doing, which I’m provisionally going to call Diagrams, and which will be done with, among others, the people from CMPR, especially Dr Sergei Shubin, who is a man who is making me raise my game every time I talk with him.

But I need to talk about Tide a little before it gets lost inside other projects within projects.

So. When I started talking with Ian in the Marine Energy Research Group about his work and that of his colleagues, it struck me that I wanted, in my response to the work, to explore movement in terms of fluidity, of change, of a constructed thing that offered transformation, that was not itself wholly static, that moved in both transitive and intransitive senses.

I wanted to make concrete poetry, which is, if you don’t know, where you create poetry in which the mode of transmission, the artefact if you will, is part of the poem itself.

I decided very early on — before I even scored the residency, in fact — to use as my raw material some Swansea blue clay. Since the Council policy of moving the sand on the beach to prevent erosion and flood risks ended, the blue clay, constantly covered and uncovered by the tides, has become easy to find.

For many years, Engineering students in Swansea have been asked to go down to the beach and borrow handfuls of clay in order to practice soil analysis on it. So my raw material reflects not only the coastline itself — that will be affected, in terms of its life and its very shape, by the very turbines that might preserve our way of life, that might force us to make very tough choices as some species live and some species die — but also the work of a researcher in the University from its very beginning.

When Ian was a first-year student at Swansea, he was one of those students who had to dig the clay and experiment on it. It’s a tiny part of his work and story. And part of the story of his project in a tiny way. It represents the coast; it represents the life of a researcher.

With the clay, I fashioned eight tablets; on each I inscribed one of eight lines of a fragmentary, non-linear poem, which I intended to make the same degree of sense in no matter which order they were read.

I’ll think it right to make my choices harder

I shall change the coastline by degrees

Our future might extend beyond the lights

On a curve on a ridge in the sand in the sea

Fish will swim between my arms

If I could revolve here

Beneath the driving waters I will stand

Beginning with the sand above the clay

Once the tablets were fired, they would be placed on a table or tray and the public would be invited to move them and to read them in a fashion that if not open, would be fluid and at the same time prescripted; the options for the reading of the poem are manifold yet finite; some options are more hermeneutically satisfactory than others. The poem poses a puzzle and a problem, just as the land problematises the research.

The audience moves and interacts; the audience is moved, literally, as the poem demands to be touched. The audience participates.

That’s me in the bottom right hand corner, in the checked shirt. It was a good night.

At the opening of When the Moon Fell Out of Orbit.

My fellow Swansea University Artist-in-Residence-in-waiting, Fern Thomas, begins her exhibition with a private view tonight. It runs at the Mission Gallery from 2nd June to 15th July.

A bobbin, salvaged from a derelict woollen mill and sold for pennies. The wool isn’t good for anything; it’s stained and ill-smelling. The wood is damp and cracked.

It’s an object redolent with sadness and meaning.

This is Fern’s project, alongside which I’ll be working.

“Digital media and art connecting with race, migration and globalisation.”

I want to talk about the history and future of Wales, its landscape and its attitudes, both internal and external. Landscapes.

Swansea University is currently working on a three-year Bridging the Gaps project, and part of that is an artistic residency, for which I’ve been shortlisted.

The material here is part of my audition. It’s a risk, I know, but it needs to be taken.

The idea is that we create art based around interdisciplinary research in Swansea.

Here’s a multi-million pound project to create new sources of renewable energy through tidal turbines.

Here’s a project exploring the history of a once-thriving region in Swansea — and working towards its regeneration.

Here’s a lab exploring the way that social media and new technologies change the way we relate to our landscape and each other.

That’s just a start.

The point is, all these things tell a story, a story about the people here, and more widely, a universal story about human experience now, in the past, and in times to come. The creation of new sources of energy changes a landscape, adding new chapters to its story. New technologies change the landscape of our society, of our social interactions.

We’ve changed over time. We’re changing ever fast, always in transition.

I want the chance to tell this story, through poetry, performance, visual art, and technology.