Alia

Damian is the Hampshire Poet 2024-26. He works with arts organisations, councils, schools, museums and community groups to get people to connect & have fun performing  and writing poetry. He also does commissions and residencies.  Damian is an experienced spoken word poet. He’s performed at events and festivals around the UK (Royal Albert Hall, Edingburgh Fringe, Brighton Fringe, WOMAD) and The British School in Rome. ” With written and spoken word, images and performance I explore how we live now: with each other, the more-than-human world and our changing climate.

I am a visual artist who works across a range of media, originally crochet and textile but more recently in sculpture, installation and performance. I have a sensory approach to connecting to materials, most of them domestic recycled waste. I am very interested in experimentation and cross collaborations with artists from other disciplines and also outside of the field of the arts. Across the years, my practice has delved into the visual and metaphorical links between neuroscience and crochet, the cracking and transformations of womanhood after the menopause and more recently the opening and reconnecting to nature.

I am an artist living on the edge of The New Forest. I use folklore, folksong, old customs, games and rituals to explore contemporary issues particularly social and economic disparity. Country living can be a strange mix of bounty and hopelessness but when people have access to their own strong and sinuous roots, their own history and stories they have anchorage and hope. I seek the stories that connect us and as an artist I’m thinking of different ways of pinning them up on the metaphorical village hall notice board for all to see. Alongside my own practice I run drawing workshops as The Village Hall Draw and community workshops around the New Forest working with Culture in Common and Hampshire Cultural Heritage amongst others.