Mary Stella Edwards’ multi-hyphenate career spanned poetry, painting and commercial art. She developed an unusual sensibility for the more-than-human world during her months spent at The Cabin in the fishing village of Bucks Mills with her partner Judith Ackland. The two women were very different, but each brought out the strengths and supported the work of the other. Together, between 1924 and 1971, they walked, swam, painted, went rock pooling, and worked in and around Bucks Mills. It’s also where Edwards wrote some of her most extraordinary poetry. I am very lucky to be the first PhD student to research the Ackland and Edwards archive at the Burton at Bideford, which contains their letters, journals, sketchbooks and photos.

I am looking at Mary Stella Edwards’ poetry through the lens of ‘lichenism’ – a term I have adopted as a means to explore how the symbiotic relations between people, and between humans and the more-than-human can co-create new futures. Lichenism is a combination of lichenology, biosemiotics and new materialism. It is a framing that disrupts our way of understanding the world and ourselves. Lichenism’s pronouns are: we/us.

Edwards recognised humans as being one intelligence among many – an understanding of ontology that extended a kind of animism to matter as well as living things.
Her 1920 poem The Chestnut Tree starts:

“How strange that furniture can mean so much;
A wooden table, ragged cloth, two chairs,
A teapot with a broken spout . . . we touch
Some live thing unawares.”

My own work sits alongside Edwards’ poetry work, but takes a “material-discursive” (Barad, 2003) approach; exploring the indivisibility of matter and meaning. Like Edwards I want to explore the entanglement of life and matter, but I also don’t want to speak for the more-than-human world. I am fascinated by the communication of the algal and fungal cells within lichen, and am making prints and artists books that explore these “lyrics of the lichens”, as Le Guin put it in her 1974 short story, The Author of the Acacia Seeds.

I am taking three approaches:

• ‘Negative Ecopoetry’ as described by Rigby (2004) – which, by being unreadable, draws attention to the intelligences other than our own, but without speaking for them. I am doing this through over-printing, and using texts, texture and languages as a metaphor for biosemiotic interpretation.

• Collage, which creates relationship, and new meanings – with the added bonus of surprise and chance discovery.

• Making paints and letterpress inks from earth pigments and laked botanical dyes – North Devon, where I live, is rich with colour, and one way to ‘give voice’ to the more-than-human world is to involve it in the work. This is changing my palette, and my relationship to place and materials.

Welcome to the Lichen Resistance!

Bibliography
Barad, K. (2003) ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.’ In: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society [online]. 28 (3), pp. 801–831.

Edwards, M.S. (1926) Time and Chance. 1st edition. London: The Hogarth Press.

Le Guin, Ursula K. (2015) ‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds.’ In: The Unreal and the Real. Gollancz, pp. 265–272.

Rigby, K. (2004) ‘Earth, World, Text: On the (Im)possibility of Ecopoiesis.’ In: New Literary History [online]. 35 (3), pp. 427–442.

You can find out more about Rachel’s work via her website or see Instagram.

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UWE Bristol, City Campus at Bower Ashton, Kennel Lodge Road, Bristol BS3 2JT.