Natural Monument: Chalk Stream, Jacquie Campbell, 2021, chalk, tennis ball

Campbell's second monument has been placed beside The Lark, a chalk stream that runs through Bury St Edmunds. There are 3,000 chalk streams in the world, but 85% of them are in England. The combination of geology and climate creates a unique microsystem with supports particular wildlife. 

Anti-monument
 
Brown nut, seed husk, encoded tree,
Say, what do you recall?
The memory of how suddenly,
how violently I fall.
The way I’ll split and shoot and bear
up leaves that turn to green,
the heat of sun, the touch of air,
and darkness in between.
My thickening trunk that browns and grows
towards the teasing sky,
as leaves and fruits and falls and blows
mark seasons passing by.
 
Brown nut, seed husk, encoded tree,
are you remembering what will be? 
A different kind of history.
A glimpse of future memory.
 
Natalie Low

Jacquie Campbell As someone who is simultaneously baffled and fascinated by the everyday world, my artistic activity allows me to think through the questions that niggle at the back of my mind. I am often absorbed with how we perceive and connect with barely visible and overlooked processes that exist within our surroundings and everyday life. I construct spaces, journeys and sometimes objects that invite ‘noticing’. I am interested in how we can practice ‘deep looking’, beyond the visual, using all our senses. I wonder whether a stronger understanding and better connection with these unexamined processes would lead to different ways of being in the world: a sense of wellness and a new environmental conversation.
​Instagram @ jaccampbellrojo @flow.east @wildhabits2020 www.jaccampbell.com

Natalie Low enjoys putting words on paper and believes that everyone has a book of some sort inside them. She has published two chapbooks, Dementia (2015) and School Run (2017). She is a regular contributor to CollectConnect exhibitions, both as a writer and artist/maker. Instagram nat.low Facebook Natalie Low

​Codd Monument,  Henny Burnett, 2021, cast concrete, rubber, marble, thread 5cmx5cmx2cm

Hiram Codd (10 January 1838 – 18 February 1887) was an English engineer born in Bury St Edmunds. In 1872, he patented a bottle filled under gas pressure, which pushed a marble against a rubber washer in the neck, creating a perfect seal. 

There is a second personal monument Sight: to conform to size request by groving I used an old eye drop bottle to cast from. I take eye drops to stabilize my glaucoma, the small half sphere attached by the pink thread is cast from a contact lens case and the tread symbolizes the optic nerve. 

​Codd Monument has been placed in Churchgate Street, the poems are by Marianne Habeshaw and Urve Opik. 
​

Happy round face,
when writing, you don’t worry
about shuffling a line 
around lines that are also moving.
Showering isn’t relief patter 
because you need no breaks 
from life. No call for hiding 
mirrors or phones, your ego craves 
nothing anonymous. Never wiping clean 
summer lines, or caring about 
augmented pillars officially standing.
Just your place at the craft table,
with a slapdash Pritt stick and a
friend welding the scissors,
just folding pipe cleaners into a circle 
until the job is done. 
 
Keep the pink string and marble
and flip it around your finger when 
getting told off, knowing failure 
helps nothing. When you think of 
this string, your cheeks bunch
like Grandma’s curtains.
All you want is to be
is with family, grass swaying
and smiles like umbrellas 
which meet as machinery does.
When they grin at you,
it is like your eye
has caught a fish.

Marianne Habeshaw

Codd Monument (to Hiram Codd)
 
A cork may stop the spill, hold water tight–
But over time the stealthy gas escapes
its liquid bind in tiny sighs off light.
 
It takes a heft of patience to reshape
the effervescecent ever present Now,
and hold it lulled until the time to wake
 
those tiny urgent pulses and allow
the bottled-up excitement to erupt
in frothed exuberance.  The question how
 
to hold the bubbles still and interrupt 
their eager upward gust was made concrete
and answered by a tender kiss that tucked
 
anticipation seamlessly between
a marble pressed into a perfect seal.
This circuitry of tension and release 
 
repeats itself as ouroboros wheel
of fleeing moments loosened and resealed. 

Urve Opik
 
Henny Burnett is a mixed media artist who lives and works in Bristol and London. She attended Byam Shaw and Edinburgh Colleges of Art. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, undertaking residencies in Italy and Britain. She has won awards from Juliet Gomperts Trust, The British council, ACE and travel grants to Canada and USA. Recently a finalist for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2021 and awarded a commission for new work by Procreate Project funded by ACE. Twitter @cicatrixart Instagram @hennyburnett www.axisweb.org/p/hennyburnett/

Marianne Habeshaw  is an emerging, contemporary poet living in Peterborough/East London. Her work reflects on learnt social behaviours and internal conflicts, written with intimate, frank humour and striking, fulsome imagery. 
Marianne’s first poetry collection Blather Gaps has been recently been awarded the TLC Free Reads Scheme. 

Habeshaw's  poem The Scene is part of LADA, Something Other latest chapter Visions; the poem Sandpaper Hands is included in  their upcoming Unseen! 4 with Unseen Words and Visuals Collective; poems Puffer Trains and Obtainable Anxiety  are part of Gold Akanbi’s upcoming collection Unbound. Instagram @razmaztaz

Urve Opik studied art history at Manchester University and the Courtauld, and worked for many years as an Arts Administrator.  She became increasingly interested in the life psychotherapeutic in the late 1990s, retrained, and now practices as a psychotherapist.  She retains a deep interest in the visual arts, and has a quiet writing practise running on the side and weaving through her life.   

Today three new Monuments to Boredom gain recognition, in Churchgate Street, Skinner Lane and St Andrews Street South - a particularly boring street it seems. Thanks to Irene Perez Hernandez I at least will never be able to take a walk again without coming across these everyday monuments. 

Digit Blocks, Hermione Allsopp, 2021, plaster, thimbles, paint, varnish, 5cmx5cmx5cm

Hermione Allsopp's Digit Blocks are gathered at the Constitutional Club and in Bridewell Lane. 

​IF COLSTON WERE STONE
                                                
“How are the mighty fallen?”
I have literally fallen.
They have written over my feet
And pushed me into the water.
I wanted to swim, except I sank like a stone.
Because I am a big stone.
 
This alabaster gaol is not of 
my choosing, constraining
my colour like a sealed inkwell,
Unwritten words from an unused quill.
I am petrified, fossilised, literally set in stone,
Because I am a big stone.
 
To remember my deeds, you put me
In a park to collect pigeon shit,
Then, to punish, locked me in a museum.
But virtues or vices, my deeds are part of you. 
And so I am become your millstone,
Because I am a big stone.
 
Natalie Low

Digit Blocks, Hermione Allsopp, 2021, iron filler, plaster, thimbles, paint, varnish

Mini Monuments
 
Bevelled blocks, 
of balanced proportions,
soothing in their sameness
and tactile, like marble.
 
Each one faux finished, 
layered like sediment
compressed 
by geological time.
 
Little dips collect 
coloured slip 
which pools 
in the puddles,
so each one is distinct.
 
Moveable monuments
able to commemorate,
and venerate values
as they change.
 
Deborah Bowkis

Hermione Allsopp makes sculptural work by collecting objects and furniture and re-creating them into new forms or compositions.  These are familiar, known, domestic items that have been discarded in charity or junk shops – not, inert materials, but ones that carry collective attachments, memories and meanings. As sculpture, these re-done, or un-done-up objects begin to exist as something else and are intended to raise questions about the value and material nature of every day objects. Through the choice of objects, and the techniques she employs, she explores the boundary between repulsion and attraction, ideas of taste and notions of desire.  The work also reflects on wider topics related to consumerism, psychological and physical interiors and exteriors. Twitter @HermioneAllsopp Instagram @hermioneallsopp Facebook Hermione Allsopp www.hermionallsopp.com

Natalie Low enjoys putting words on paper and believes that everyone has a book of some sort inside them. She has published two chapbooks, Dementia (2015) and School Run (2017). She is a regular contributor to CollectConnect exhibitions, both as a writer and artist/maker. Instagram nat.low Facebook Natalie Low

Deborah Bowkis has published through competition prizes and in anthologies, including Ink Pantry Sea of Ink and Voices of the Brecks. She currently works as an academic and has taught creative writing courses and workshops in Suffolk. In 2016 she set up a thriving creative writing group, Left to Write, in Bury St. Edmunds. 
​https://greenacrewriters.blogspot.com, http://www.breakingnewground.org.uk

Sandra Lane's second sculpture to celebrate the everyday and overlooked decorates Angel Hill. 

​A word
In your little pink shell-like.
It may seem nice-iced, but don’t risk a tooth, don’t dent a denture.
For though this swirly nugget seems so sweet,
I fear it will not dissolve with the quick tongue-tip-hit that you imagine.
The cake that it graced was a permanent cake.
A hard-as-rock cake.
This has toppled off to torment the taste buds with its twee teasing twist and 
Bake-Off colouring.
Yum, yum, crunch…ouch.
 
Lynn Whitehead