The 18 selected Disappear Here artists who worked in collaborative pairs to produce 27 poetry-films about Coventy ringroad.
Brian Harley
Brian Harley is an award-winning filmmaker and founder of Short Night Films based in Coventry. Brian has written and directed a number of acclaimed short films, including his award winning ‘A Dream I Had’ (2013) and ‘Eventide’ (2012)
Brian is also the current programmer and host of non-profit film exhibition label Roots to Shoots.
Emily Wright
Emily Wright is a film maker based in Birmingham. Since finishing a degree in music composition in 2015 she has set up a film production company called Trapeze Film alongside Reuben Penny. She recently received an Arts Council England-funded commission to make a film for the Frontiers Festival and made an animation of the demolition of the old brutalist Birmingham Library. Brutalist architecture is a strong inspiration for her work as she is interested in drawing attention to anything unpopular and unloved.
Richard Houguez
Richard Houguez is a visual artist, born in the Lower Eastern Green area of Coventry, now living and working in London. Their projects are predominantly research-based and consultation-oriented, exploringexpressions of community and intimacy, heritage and sense of place. They often collaborate or work collectively across disciplines of film, photography, drawing, writing and mapping. Previous projects include OOTO Places, Kent; Intersections, Nottingham; Summerlab 2014, UK, and UV Spa, V&A lates, London.
Emilia Moniszko
Emilia Moniszko is a multidisciplinary artist and a social entrepreneur. Having completed BA in Fine Art at Coventry University (2014) and MA in Arts, Enterprise and Development at University of Warwick (2015), she actively promotes the city’s cultural scene through her freelance arts practice as well as through her engagement in the role of director and researcher at Kalejdoskop East-West.
Her most recent project From East to West With Love was a Coventry-rooted exploration of artistic, cultural and political exchanges between Eastern and Western Europe.
Alex Taylor
Alex Taylor is a self-employed film maker in coventry.
He runs Mindsweep Media, a film based production company est. 2014.
Ben Cook
Ben Cook is a film-maker based in the UK. His documentary work has covered mental illness, social housing, women refugees, disability and aids awareness. In 2014 he established The 1201 Project a documentary production company that goes far beyond film-making to build a software platform that upscales solutions to the world’s social problems. The 1201 Project is currently producing a series of films with the South African Biosphere Trust investigating UNESCO Biosphere Reserves throughout the country. In a fiction film capacity he co-founded Anti/Type Films in 2009. Since then he has written and directed eight short films, a feature film and produced many more.
John McCaughley
John is about to complete his studies in Media Production at Coventry University. His work has screened at many festivals including StArt Fest 2015, ScreenTest Festival 2016 and Just Before Midnight Noir Film Fest 2016.
By exploring the city’s ring road poetically, John hopes to gain a better understanding of his own approach to poetic film making. The idea of working with poets and writers is exciting; John hopes this collaboration will push his creative process into new areas of experimentation and poetic truth.
Cormac Faulkner
Cormac Faulkner is an Irish artist now based in Coventry. His work is concerned with our reaction to different spaces and how our behaviour and understanding can change when presented with new information and new ways of exploring them. He is a multi-disciplinary artist and uses sound, light and sculptural materials in his work.
www.cormacfaulkner.wordpress.com
Zoe Palmer
Zoë Palmer is a writer, librettist and presenter with a background in Human Ecology. At the core of her work is a fascination with human-nature relationships. She has worked with Spitalfields Music for the past 5 years developing Musical Rumpus, an interactive opera series for children 0-2 (Charity Award Winner 2014, RPS Award Shortlist 2014).
Martin Green
Martin Green is committed to the routine and discipline of studio practice and how the resulting pieces interact with the exhibiting environment. His work explores joining sculpture, writing and performance together.
His current practice is about developing exhibitions through live-curation events where sculptural components are placed in direct response to the reading of collaged text that reflects themes developed through the process of producing the sculptures.
The current sculptural components are architectonic explorations of modern buildings and elevated road structures made with a range of found and donated urban materials.
Dora Mortimer
Dora is a poet, writer and essayist based in London. She is an editor at DIVA magazine and has written on The Squat In Queer Art And Culture and given talks on queer writers, choreographies and closets. She is very excited to be working on the project and looking forward to getting to know the ring road better — from a safe distance!
Mab Jones
Mab Jones is a “unique talent” (The Times) who has read her work all over the UK, in the US, France, Ireland and Japan. She is winner of the John Tripp Spoken Poetry Audience Award, in the Liverpool Lennon Performance Poetry competition, the Word Factory Neil Gaiman Short Story competition, and the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize, amongst others. Her recent collection, ‘take your experience and peel it’, is published by Indigo Dreams. She teaches creative writing at Cardiff University, writers for the New York Times, and presents a poetry programme on BBC Radio 4 this coming November. She also coordinates International Dylan Thomas Day.
Leanne Bridgewater
A keen Coventry resident and pro-active in the community, Leanne Bridgewater is a poet and artist.
Shortlisted for the 2015 Melita Hume poetry award; her first poetry collection ‘Confessions of a Cyclist’ has recently been published by Knives Forks and Spoons Press. The book is a poetic surveillance into Coventarian’s conservations as one passes folk on a bike, to and from work, from one side of Coventry to the other.
Her heart lies in the environment, eco-poetry, language poetry and last but most exciting: visual poetry, sometimes called ‘asemic writing’, where words and art blend and become one: a vision.
Sarah James
Sarah James is a journalist, poet, fiction writer, editor, occasional playwright and photographer, with six published poetry collections.
Winner of the Overton Poetry Prize 2015, her latest books are a pamphlet-length sequence Lampshades & Glass Rivers published by Loughborough University and Plenty-Fish (Nine Arches Press). A poetry-play The Magnetic Diaries tours with Reaction Theatre Makers in 2016, including Ledbury Poetry Festival, a 2-week run at Edinburgh Fringe, Bristol Poetry Festival, Birmingham MAC and London’s The Vaults.
Hidden parts of Coventry, water, time and sound are all things that she hopes to explore with Disappear Here film-maker Ben Cook. But she’s also looking forward to following whatever spontaneous inspiration the project brings.
James Grady
James is a Coventry-born poet who has performed at live poetry events all over the UK.
He currently teaches in Rugby, runs the Twisted Words open-mic night – he believes in Gin and Sonnets.
Disappear Here 