As a final commission for her Quay Words Summer residency on the theme of 'Vessels', Sarah Acton developed the spoken word piece 'Book of the Exe'.
During her summer residency, Sarah engaged with the theme through embodied writing and research practice, walking repeated circular routes, together with research at the archives and collecting conversations and memories on route and also chatting to visitors in the Wharfinger’s office at the Exeter Custom House about the Ship’s Canal, Exe River waters and stories of Quayside ships, goods and workers.
Sarah's original spoken word piece weaves fragments; voices and conversations real and imagined, and explores memory as relationship to this place and the past - alive in the present. What if the River remembers everything it has witnessed and experienced and speaks, what does it sound like when we listen for timeslips as we walk the Quay today, their emotional resonance storying the waters, tow paths and rooms of Custom House?
Book of the Exe was first broadcast in collaboration with musician Emma Welton as a podcast on River Radio in September, produced by Art Work Exeter. Thank you to everyone involved in bringing this piece together.
About Sarah Acton
Sarah is a writer and poet passionate about place, nature, and people through collective memory, oral storytelling culture and working landscapes. Sarah’s recent work includes spoken word and performance, poetry and outdoor events including poetry walks, community theatre, creating educational resources and designing and delivering socially engaged arts projects. She has worked with Dorset, Blackdown Hills and East Devon National Landscapes and has had frequent commissions from Stepping into Nature, with long-standing partnerships with regional museums, libraries, and memory cafes. Her recent book, Seining Along Chesil (Little Toller, 2022) captures memories, voices and stories of Dorset Seine fishing traditions. Sarah founded the ongoing Heart of Stone oral history project about the stone industry and quarrying on Portland, and Caught in the Net community project and plays. Sarah recently returned from a rural tour of the South West with a spoken word piece Seiners, commissioned by Sound UK with film by Common Ground and live musical accompaniment from musicians Becki Driscoll, Julie Macara and Emily Burridge. Much of Sarah’s work is about the relationship between natural environment, human culture and the other-than-human world, exploring how physical landscape holds memory and shapes ours, and the communal and individual construction of identity and memory, connections between landscape, myth-making and the stories communities remember and tell about the past, their world, and their place in it. Sarah lives in Devon, swims in the sea and is a gig rower. She has sailed around the world (not solo!) and loves reinvented maritime and folk traditions.
Photo credit: Robin Mills
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