Workshop 2

Session 1: Manchester Museum Herbarium

The first part of the workshop will be led by Rachel Webster in Manchester Museum. We will have a tour of the  herbarium, paying attention to female bryologists of the past as well as mosses linked to non-traditional routes into science, artisan botanists and the various taxonomies and naming systems/histories of mosses. Following the tour we will look more closely at individual boxes and moss-related items – Rachel will use the museum’s collections to physically show some of the ideas and concepts Joey Pickard covered in his comprehensive talk in Workshop 1. 

Session 2: The Poetry of Moss

Bearing the themes around working-class and non-conformist collectors that Rachel will have spoken about in the first part of the workshop in mind, this second session led by Abbi Flint will engage us further with the physical nature of the herbarium and moss collections. We will focus on their material aspects and bring these  into conjunction with sensory, imaginative and  intellectual associations around moss. We will also consider ‘accidental’ archival material – e.g. the re-use of printed material by collectors to make moss-packets.  Participants will be encouraged to make notes and take pictures of ‘found texts’ that spark their imagination during Session 1. We will draw on these for a range of activities, including a free-writing exercise, and the creation of poems in correspondence with poetic moss packets. Poetry as a mode of inquiry is the framework  that will guide our practice.