This creative writing group led by author Amy Mason concentrates on writing exercises inspired by visual art and conversations with Spike Island studio holders. These encounters are designed to provide ideas for new writing or new ways of presenting work.  As always, supportive peer critique is central to the group’s activity.

Artist Doug Clark joins March's session to discuss his sculptural work and the influence of his experience as a sailor and engineer. He says of his previous career, "Seamen are different. They are usually self-sufficient. Once you are over the horizon, people forget about you. There’s no one to help you if you break down in the Southern Ocean. You have to be practically creative, sometimes just to survive... I firmly believe engineers are artists. Most of them just don’t know it." Clark's current work often makes use of industrial materials alongside new media and video. His research considers the status and role of the monument in the 21st century.

Doug Clark

Doug Clark’s work embraces an industrial aesthetic, bringing to the forefront that which we normally ignore as "just being there". In this work, non-art – by which he means functional constructions never envisaged as art – is taken as a starting point from which new and idiosyncratic structures are developed. Clark’s work has recently been included in the Bath Fringe Arts Festival (2011) and in the group exhibition Lot’s Wife at Salisbury Art Centre (2012).

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Doug Clark's website

Amy Mason

Amy Mason, an author based in Bristol, was writer in residence at Spike Island from April to December 2011. For the last five years Mason has concentrated on short stories and work for performance. She used her time here to complete her first novel, Ida. As part of her residency she initiated Write Club, a monthly creative writing group for anyone with an interest in prose, poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction.

Mason's story 'To the Bridge' was published in the Tindal Street Press anthology Roads Ahead in 2009, and later that year two more of her stories were published in Markings magazine. In 2010 she received commissions from theatre companies Show of Strength and Travelling Light to write short plays as well as a commission from Bristol City Council to write for the Bristol Audio Stories project. Mason has read her work at Green Man and Port Eliot Festivals and has worked with The House of Fairytales, the artist-led project established by Deborah Curtis and Gavin Turk, as a storyteller and workshop facilitator.

Amy Mason on Twitter