Mat Osmond

Mat’s a writer and illustrator who joined the MA Illustration: Authorial Practice team in 2009. With a longstanding interest in the arts’ contribution to the ecosophical turn emerging from our present culture’s radical unsustainability, the central preoccupation behind his own work is the notion of  ‘illustrating ecological recovery’. His recent practice includes a series of image & word poetry chapbooks, catalogued under his own imprint Strandline Books along with related collaborative projects & research.

Mat's part of the Art.Earth research collective based at Dartington, Devon, where he’s co-steered three creative summits to date: Language, Landscape and The Sublime, June 2016; In Other Tongues, June 2017; Liquidscapes, June 2018. Having published his own illustration, poetry and essays with the Dark Mountain Project since 2010, in 2017 Mat acted as guest art editor on Issue 11 of their Dark Mountain Journal, and curated a recent blog series for them which flowed out of the In Other Tongues Summit.

Mat's had two new essays published in 2017: An Underswell of Divination, about the poet Ted Hughes' and the artist Leonard Baskin's illustrational collaborations, and Meinrad Craighead and the Animal face of God, on the shifting personification of the sacred within the work of the American painter, writer and Benedictine nun, Meinrad Craighead. In June 2017 he taught a five-day residential Art.Earth Short Course with the poet Dr. Alyson Hallett (a colleague on the MA Illustration team), Intimate Ecologies, which experimented with writing, drawing and improvised ritual as means to enter into a reciprocal conversation with place. Mat’s currently involved in co-steering the second Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival, and working on a new collaborative book of images and poems with the artist Kate Walters, founder of the Cornwall-based arts initiative Drawing Down the Feminine.