Jen Hadfield

My writing and visual artworks are concerned with making the secular sacred. I have published two poetry collections with Bloodaxe Books, Almanancs and Nigh-No-Place, written in Shetland, the Western Isles, Canada and at 35,000 ft. The poems are united by themes of wilderness, their fretting over what it means to be 'no-place' and what it means to be 'at home'. Making a symbolic home in Canada, and one in Shetland, has been vital to my creative practice. In my visual and poetic works I use paints, bruck metal, space, scraps of salvaged language and beach rubbish to create half imaginary landscapes in tins or on paper. These places are presided over by a contemporary set of patron saints such as Luckyminney, The Lucy (patron saint of light, sight and nosiness; attended by a pack of roving satellites) and Mr Dolorosa. My most recent visual work was strongly influenced by Mexican devotional folk-art, and funded by a Dewar Award throughout 2007. My current literary project is a first novel, set in the west coast of Canada in the 1920s.