Lost & Found Listening Walk with Dr Helen Foster

About

Wednesday 16th July | 2025 | 1pm - 2pm

Nottingham Contemporary

FREE

This season, we are presenting Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen, a thematic group exhibition and associated live programme which considers how sound travels and transitions through cross-cultural identities, histories, and futures.

Join Dr Helen Foster for a stroll around the historic streets bordering Nottingham Contemporary inspired by stories from the Nottingham Oral History Collection. This Collection, in the care of Nottingham Central Library, was recorded in the 1980s and offers insights into the lives of local people during the first half of the twentieth century.

On the walk we will listen to some of the stories from the archive and explore how this material can connect us to places. We will consider oral history as a form of found poetry and there will be an opportunity to view poetry films inspired by this oral history collection and created as part of Dr Helen Foster's recent writing residency with the British Library at the end of the walk.

Helen Foster is a community-engaged writer, researcher and oral historian. She writes fiction and experiments with poetic forms, including found, verbatim and transcription poetry, and poetry film. She was recently an artist in residence for the British Library's Sounds Collection where her Lost & Found project took oral history archives back to the places that originally inspired them. Her practice also explores the therapeutic potential of creative writing and storytelling processes and she is currently a Creative Writing Associate with Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare at the University of Leicester.

Access:

This event will be held off-site, in the historic streets surrounding Nottingham Contemporary. Meet at Nottingham Contemporary's Reception.

Speakers will use microphones.

If you have any questions around access or have specific access requirements we can accommodate, please get in touch with us by emailing info@nottinghamcontemporary.org or phoning 0115 948 9750.

Please note the walking route includes hills and steps.

Route:

Starting at Nottingham Contemporary

Down Middle Hill to the area outside Central Library

Back up Middle Hill

To Adams Building, Stoney Street, Lace Market

To St Mary's Church and National Justice Museum

Back to Nottingham Contemporary