Mat Osmond

Mat’s a writer and illustrator who joined the MA Illustration Authorial Practice team in 2009. With a longstanding interest in the role of the arts in addressing our culture’s radical unsustainability, his recent practice includes an ongoing series of image & word poetry chapbooks, Strandline Books - including the winner of the 2015 Michael Marks award for Poetry Illustration, Fly Sings - as well as related collaborations with poet Em Strang (Stone, Atlantic Press 2016) and painter Kate Walters (The Black Madonna’s Song, Atlantic Press 2020).

Mat regularly publishes essays that speak to the entanglement of art, ecology and spirit that engages his work – most recently An Underswell of Divination, about the illustrational collaborations between Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin, Meinrad Craighead and the Animal face of God, on the shifting personification of the sacred within the work of the painter and writer Meinrad Craighead, and Greenstone Axe, a meditation on mass-extinction, ecological recovery and earth-centred prayer. As part of Falmouth University’s Dark Economies research group, in 2019 Mat curated Negotiating the Surrender, a regional series of talks and workshops with Dark Mountain co-founder Dougald Hine, that spoke to the regenerative culture at the heart of the Extinction Rebellion movement; he recently led a residential Short Course with poet and MA colleague Dr. Alyson Hallett, Intimate Ecologies, which experimented with writing, drawing and improvised ritual as means to enter into a reciprocal conversation with place. In 2016 & 2018 he co-steered the Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival as part of which curated Seeing Voices, an exhibition celebrating recent poetry & illustration publications by students, staff and alumni of the MA Illustration Authorial Practice. Mat's a Director of the graphic literature publisher Atlantic Press, and of the Art.Earth research collective based at Dartington, with whom he’s currently leading on a three-day Creative Summit planned for November 2020 on the theme of Death, Dying & Change. He’s co-led three such summits to date: Language, Landscape and The Sublime, In Other Tongues and Liquidscapes. Having regularly published his own illustration, poetry and essays with the Dark Mountain Project since its inception in 2010, in 2017 Mat acted as guest Art Editor on Issue 11 of their Dark Mountain Journal, and curated their In Other Tongues series of blog posts the same year: a series of six essays that flowed out of the 2017 Art.Earth summit.