Sophie Collins
Poet in Residence (2020 Art & Poetry)
Sophie Collins is a poet and translator based in Glasgow, UK. She participated in the 2020 ‘Art & Poetry’ residency session, guest curated by Rachael Allen in partnership with Viaindustriae, Foligno. Sophie spent time researching in the Viaindsutriae Archive and the connected De Donno Collection. She paid particular attention to their holdings of John Cage material. In their introduction to the affiliated ‘Art & Poetry’ publication, to which Sophie contributed, Rachael and Guy Robertson (curator, Mahler & LeWitt Studios) write:
From a painting by Piero di Cosimo, itself based on Lucretius’s Latin text De rerum natura, and a performance piece by John Cage involving chance processes, Sophie Collins initiates a dislocating thread of stories, ruminating on honesty and figurative language. With a long-standing interest in scaffolds and other functional structures, Sophie has also been focussing on the abundance of scaffolds in Spoleto – particularly noticeable because of recent earthquake damage – and in Italy more broadly. She is interested in the common contemporary evocation of the scaffold, conversationally, as an analogy or metaphor for various kinds of support, and how such metaphorical language can risk curtailing critical thinking on a given subject.
To receive a copy of the publication, please email us at info@mahler-lewitt.org.
Biography Sophie Collins grew up in Bergen, North Holland, and now lives in Glasgow. She is the author of Who Is Mary Sue? (Faber, 2018) and small white monkeys (Book Works, 2017), and the editor of Currently & Emotion (Test Centre, 2016), an anthology of con- temporary poetry translations; a sequel, Intimacy, is forthcoming. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. She is the translator, from the Dutch, of Lieke Marsman’s The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes (Pavilion, 2019). She is currently trans- lating Marsman’s novel, The Opposite of a Person (Daunt Books, 2022).