Lorna is a multidisciplinary artist with experience working in Offender Learning. She is interested in the softening of boundaries between art-forms, specifically visual art and poetry, and the use of the creative processes in rehabilitation. An Art school graduate and holder of a Masters in Poetry from Glasgow University Lorna is able to move seamlessly between the worlds of literary and performance poetry. Mentored by Tom Leonard while at Glasgow University, and a regular of the Glasgow poetry circuit. Pigeon with Warburtons is both art and artefact: a multimedia collection blending Lorna's distinctive, arresting poetic voice with photography, documented art, interactive imagery and a new, limited edition artwork unique to this publication.
THE ARTIST BANDAID
The first run of Lorna’s collection came with a piece of free art! That’s 300 artist bandaids.
The Artist Band Aid was originally produced in response to Lorna having to hold down three jobs to fund her MPhil in Creative Writing in 2006, in order to stay afloat and be able to create her art. Three hundred of these were painstakingly reproduced (with the help of Sam Small from SpecBooks) so that the first print of Pigeon with Warburtons would be accompanied by these original, limited edition artworks, oh you lucky things!
Fierce
Today you were called a ‘Paki!’
By a six-year-old boy
He had four years on your two
You didn’t understand his language
But you knew it was not good
You were fierce
You told him to go out
Into the garden
Where he had always been
Alone, dragging himself up
Through these young years
You were fierce
Intergenerational ignorance
Tainting fresh landscapes
We are all refugees
In this mad world
And you are Zimbabweegie
You are fierce
You are all our futures
Streamlined steel, Clyde-built
There will be no hooliganism
Fearless within close shadows
Like Mary Barbour’s Army
You are fierce
Shadows
look
it’s going to get me!
no
it’s always there for you
your shadow is nyachirombo
your guardian
look
it can be a butterfly
or a bird
but you like rabbit best
look
now you can’t stop waving
to the person
on the other side
a whole new narrative
to explore
and the water is singing