Wordsmithery*

In the fifth year of our popular lit-art exhibition we teamed up with The Sunderland Indie and The Sunderland Creative Writing Festival to create an exhibition inspired by Charles Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities'. What with a global pandemic - this year for the first time, we launched an online exhibition, generously supported by HooNess. 

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As ever, we received an amazing variety of artwork: from paintings and photographs to assemblages, graphic stories, and for the first time, a film! 

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Pictured: Top - Sam Hall's interpretation of John Cogan's poem 'In Leeds'; Middle - Shaun Philip Hutchings' interpretation of ‘Recalled to life’ by Charles Eager; and Bottom - Angela Sandwith's interpretation of ‘Back Green Controversy’ by Rosemary McLeish

The project works as follows: we ask writers to write to our theme - this year we asked them to be inspired by the first line of 'A Tale of Two Cities' - then we anonymously give these written texts to a range of artists – and they will interpret the text in whatever medium they chose. In this project - for the most part - Southern writers' words were interpreted by Northern artists and Northern writers' words were interpreted by Southern artists. 

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This year 54 writers and 51 artists took part.  

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Facebook: An Assemblance of Judicious Heretics

Website: www.heretisassmble.com

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Throughout August, we launched a new video each day of one of the Heretics reading their poem or story, with the artwork it inspired. 

Follow on Twitter #AAJHlaunchAug21