A collaboration with Studio A honouring the life force of animals through poetry and art that captures the spirit of companionship.

Past/Present Pets commissions 14 Studio A artists to create a series of response poems to accompany their art based on pets – past, present, fantastic and from the future – reflecting their role in our personal, social and sacred worlds, now more than ever. 

To support the creation of the poems, six Red Room Poetry poets, Robin M. Eames, Rozanna Lilley, Johanna Featherstone, Gareth Jenkins, David Stavanger and Tamryn Bennett, worked one-on-one via Zoom with Studio A artists. Workshops ran through June and July, with the final poems and artworks published by Red Room Poetry in September 2020.

Studio A is a supported studio based in Sydney Australia that tackles the barriers that artists living with intellectual disability face in accessing conventional education, professional development pathways and opportunities needed to be successful and renowned visual artists.

Lead poet reflections 

• Love brings grief, and grief returns to love by Robin M Eames
• Words fall away by Gareth Jenkins
• Conveying a sense of magic in the everyday by Rozanna Lilley
• Challenging what a poem could be by Johanna Featherstone