Current Residents Esme Allman
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Esme Allman, Artist Headshot 1. Photo by Curtis Faro.
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Esme Allman, Artist Headshot 2. Photo by Elijah Kellman.
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Esme Allman, Noah Davis Retrospective with Claudia Rankine (poetry reading), 2025. Photo by Betty Zapata
Esme Allman is a poet and artist-facilitator, whose work explores history, natural worlds, desire and blackness through linguistic and sonic means. Her debut poetry collection, Sweet Bone Girl (Broken Sleep Books), was published in March 2025. She has received poetry commissions from the Barbican Centre, NHS Arts and Heritage, the Institute of Contemporary Art, with BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 6, Pace Gallery, English Heritage and Poetry Vs Colonialism. Her writing has appeared in 14poems, Scotland’s Transnational Heritage (Edinburgh University Press), Articulations for Keeping the Light In (Flipped Eye) and Colour of Madness (Pan Macmillan).
During my residency I will write a sequence poem that explores Suomenlinna as an ecological frontier with capacity for creativity and magic. I will research the ecological and natural history of Suomenlinna and develop poems that explore its position amongst the Helsinki archipelago. I am interested in how natural landscapes inform creativity and quotidian desire, and how their overlaps and divergences are revealed in the poetic form. My work is relevant to writers and artists because I utilise poetry as a means to inquire (and play) through questions of how our relationship/s with the natural world show up in our practice/s.
Esme Allman’s residency is realised in collaboration with New Art Exchange (Nottingham, UK).