Talk | The Making of Poetry: Adam Nicolson & Tom Hammick in Conversation
6–7pm
£18 (£16.20 For Friends and other concessions)
[ Late )
Buy Tickets >Image credit: Tom Hammick (b. 1963), In the High Mountains from The Making of Poetry, 2019, Woodcut on paper, Gift from an Anonymous Donor (2025)
Join writer Adam Nicolson and artist Tom Hammick in conversation with Pallant House Gallery Chief Curator Melanie Vandenbrouck, to celebrate Hammick’s print series on view in the Print Room at Pallant House Gallery (14 August – 25 October).
Adam and Tom will reflect on a remarkable creative journey: a shared return to the revolutionary year of 1797–98, when William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived and worked in the Quantock Hills. That intense period gave rise to poems including Lyrical Ballads, The Ancient Mariner and Tintern Abbey - works that reshaped the English imagination.
Following the poets’ letters and journals day by day, Nicolson retraced their paths, walking the same hills at dawn and dusk, immersing himself in the same shifting light, weather and darkness. Alongside him, Hammick created a series of powerful woodcuts, ‘suspended between the actual and the imagined’, as visual accompaniments to Nicolson’s book The Making of Poetry (2019).
Their conversation will chart this process of immersion and collaboration, exploring how landscape can become a living force in art.
This talk is part of our September Late event. By purchasing this talk ticket you also gain free access to our galleries, exhibitions and drop-in activities from 5–8.30pm.
Tom Hammick
Tom Hammick, aged 62, father of three more or less grown-up children, lives and works in London and East Sussex. His practice, split between painting and printmaking and informed by drawing, is shaped by music, poetry and film. While inspired by all living things, at root it is a celebration of wonderment and love and loss, and an attempt to convey his version of what it’s like to be human.
Tom’s work is in many private and public collections worldwide. For many years he taught painting and printmaking at the University of Brighton. His life revolves around biking to his studio to make work, being with family and loved ones, and experiencing life in different parts of the world.
Adam Nicolson
Adam Nicolson has written widely on history, literature, landscape and the natural world. His books include Sea Room on some small islands in the Hebrides, The Mighty Dead on Homer, The Seabird’s Cry, on the fate of the world’s seabirds, The Making of Poetry, on the year Wordsworth and Coleridge spent together in Somerset, Life Between the Tides, about some artificial rock pools he built on the Sound of Mull, and most recently Bird School on his getting to learn the nature and habits of the birds on his farm in Sussex. All of these books in their different ways explore our deep relationship to place and time. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has won the Wainwright Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, and the Somerset Maugham Award. He lives in Sussex with his wife Sarah Raven.
