Bath Canal Poetry Route

For almost 300 years Bath's beautiful canal route has drifted quietly on, ferrying travellers and goods, and slowly collecting stories. Floating down the water, fully immersed in the historic landscape, is a thought-provoking and contemplative experience that forces you to slow down and really notice your surroundings. The six locks. . . . .

For almost 300 years Bath's beautiful canal route has drifted quietly on, ferrying travellers and goods, and slowly collecting stories. Floating down the water, fully immersed in the historic landscape, is a thought-provoking and contemplative experience that forces you to slow down and really notice your surroundings. The six locks that punctuate the Bath route - rising and falling with the levels of the city - provide a central part of this experience; however they can take a long time to fill or empty whilst you wait aboard.

But imagine if there were, within each lock, something to read to pass the time; something transforming as the water levels change: a glimpse of the powerful history and ideas that the canal holds.

The project I am proposing is for the installation of six “transforming” poems within each of the Bath locks. Each poem is designed to be hidden under the upper waterline of the lock until it's emptied, the poem is then revealed line by line, and with each additional line the poem takes on new meaning. These poems would be sprayed through a laser-cut stencil onto the wall of the lock chamber using a pressure washer. This is a natural and environmentally friendly process that lifts away a layer of dirt, leaving a clean imprint of the letters on the brick. The method has already been approved and tested by myself and a team from the Canal & River Trust.

The only thing left to do is to make it happen - and that's where you come in.

The cost of installation currently stands at roughly £300 per lock. This may go down depending on efficiency of stencil layout and material, or potential re-cutting of the initial stencil. My goal is to use gogetfunding to fund the first poem and carry out installation, and then to try for the rest.

I hope you will consider donating to help me in this creative community endeavor.

Thanks for reading,

Jessica Kashdan-Brown