YOUR HIGHLIGHT

 

Winner of the PARK(ing) Day 2023 Judges Choice Award

 

Welcome to my living room! It has plenty of coziness, but the walls are bare… Come find a poem and wallpaper my room with me!

 

‘YOUR HIGHLIGHT’ is an installation piece with high audience participation. It is dynamic and engaging, evolving throughout the day into a living room that is fully finished, furnished and has poetic wallpaper - literally.

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Imagine yourself walking past a slightly peculiar outdoor living room on a street corner: there’s a big yellow armchair on a stripey rug, a table with chairs and a vase of flowers, a small bookshelf with old books in it, large potted plants and a few paintings with gilded frames. Scattered on the table are various neon highlighters. The prospective and empty ‘walls’ are strings running horizontally from corner to corner along three sides.

 

You peruse the little bookshelf, and pick up an old, vintage book. You sit down on the armchair, leafing through the book. You choose a page, pick up a highlighter (bright green? hot pink? neon yellow?) and begin to highlight words on the page. Word by word, a sort of ad-hoc, spontaneous, highlighted poem emerges.

 

Once you’ve reached the end of the page, you rip it out, and peg it up on the string along one of the sides of the living room. As more and more people find poems and peg up their poem-pages, the walls of the living room take shape and are wallpapered with highlighted poetry. Your Highlight!

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WHAT PEOPLE SAID:

‘My mind added mass and structure to the fluttering paper walls around me as I retreated into my own world of the strange narrative I was creating with a highlighter pen… the process was fun, surprisingly thought-provoking and transportive.’ (Judges’ Comments PARK(ing) Day 2023)

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‘I thought I would hate it, because I don’t like poetry, but I LOVED it’ (a participant to her friend, overheard)

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‘Finding a poem on the page is like a puzzle – it’s addictive! Can I do another one?’ (11 year old)