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Poetry on the Hoof: Resistance isn’t Futile

It was National Poetry Day on 2 October, so we’re celebrating it over a long weekend of irreverent, irritated and irate doggerel! Here’s ‘Resistance isn’t Futile ‘ to give you some encouragement on a Saturday if you’re faced with the prospect of never ending life admin chores when you could be out with your mates for those never ending Saturday nights.

I’m particularly remembering the work of Stuart Bastik: artist, thinker and occasional poet who sadly died in the summer of 2024. I worked with him and Maddi Nicholson (co-founders and co-artistic directors of Art Gene) during what became a transformational period in my life. As their project manager for many events, walks and talks across Cumbria, his approach to his life and art was sometimes engaging, often challenging but always unforgettable. ‘Resistance’ is the doff of my cap to one of life’s unique life forces.

Resistance isn’t Futile is inspired by the Borg of Star Trek infamy. The Borg would take immense amount of pleasure telling their hapless victims that ‘resistance was futile’ and that they just better buckle down and be happy with their lot. Even if it did mean colonisation, subjugation and excruciating humiliation.

It seems we hear a lot in our daily lives why things can’t happen – whether this be in a street, in a business, in a school: in all sorts of places from all sorts of people. Hearing ‘no’ so often suggests that resistance to any kind of positive social change is pointless: and in some quarters, the Borg are alive and kicking in the most unlikeliest of places.

People who tended to say ‘yes’ are were more likely to be people like Stuart. He inspired many of us to say ‘yes’ to the challenges, opportunities and sheer wonder of Barrow, its history and relationships with the natural (and industrial) worlds. He reminded us that resistance to the ‘no’ wasn’t futile, that difficulties could be overcome and that apathy was a choice, not a biological or economic given. This poem summarises the aspiration of when faced with so many ‘no-es’, so many reasons not to do things, we need to find the ‘yes’ in a situation. If we can find the ‘yes’, we can transform ourselves, our families, our communities and the world at large.

This piece was part of Art Gene’s 8 Words for Barrow-in-Furness competition during the first national lockdown in 2020. Inspired by 8 empty sky blue billboards in the town, Art Gene invited people from Barrow and Furness to enter their own suggestions for phrases to fill the space. From over 180 entries, 20 competition winners were selected by Stuart and Maddi Nicholson, and were presented in a socially distanced, outdoor artwork created by Maddi outside Art Gene HQ on Abbey Road in Barrow in 2022.

You can read ‘Resistance is Futile’ in our poetry anthology, There’s no such Things as an Englishman’

Meet Maddi Nicholson: joining our panel of judges for our Community Arts Writing Award 2025

We’re delighted to confirm that Maddi Nicholson, freelance Artist and founder director of Art Gene, a visual art charity and Arts Council NPO in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria is joining our panel of judges for our Community Arts Award 2025.

Art Gene’s research remit extends across a program of environmentally aware placemaking, socially engaged art projects, residencies, exhibitions, and education work focusing on the role and engagement of artists and communities in the revisioning of their social, natural and built environment.

As an Artist Maddi produces challenging work for varied and diverse situations nationwide, video, cast iron and stitched works to huge paintings, signage and inflated and recycled plastic sculptures.

Works range from an inflated replica of a Barrow terraced house due for demolition, in ‘Going home from here’ which toured beauty spots in Cumbria, to a set of cast iron enamelled terraced house models, commenting on the lives of 18th and 19th Century working class women in Spinningfields Manchester in ‘a place lived’.

Her Art Gene art works include the Roker Pods for Sunderland City Council: spherical mobile eco off grid pods on the beach and the prom, as café, education and events facilities. The Peoples Museum on Piel Island, for Barrow Borough Council; including a cabinet of curiosities, repurposed engraved tables, beer maps and the islands of Barrow Map. Seldom Seen Maps and Mobile Apps walking tours for coastal areas of Cumbria and Lancashire. Razzle Dazzle bird hides as education resources with interior artwork interpretation for Cumbria Wildlife Trust. Walney Island Nature reserve, mobile App walking tour and non civic war memorial gate and sculpture for Natural England’s North Walney Island national nature reserve.

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Remembering Stuart Bastik: how would you design the perfect hand grenade?

This week, I’m remembering the work of Stuart Bastik: artist, thinker and occasional poet who sadly died in the summer of 2024. I worked with him and Maddi Nicholson (co-founders and co-artistic directors of Art Gene) during what became a transformational period in my life. As their project manager for many events, walks and talks across Cumbria, his approach to his life and art was sometimes engaging, often challenging but always unforgettable. This week’s blogs is the doff of my cap to one of life’s unique life forces.

How would you design the perfect hand grenade was first published on 26 April, 2015 as part of the Fort Walney Uncovered archaeological programme on Walney Island.

It’s not a question you might ask of yourself every day but for the students exploring the air field and gun ranges of Fort Walney in Barrow, it’s something that has exercised their imagination for the last 48 hours.

Clearly, you have to be able to hold it comfortably, get a firm grip and be able to pull the pin and not have it explode in your hand which would be completely counterproductive. It should also, to be a truly effective hand grenade, cause the maximum amount of damage to whomever you throw it at: again, it would be a pretty pointless hand grenade should it just fizzle out. That’s why the surface has all those groove marks in it: when it explodes, the grooves provide natural fault lines for the explosive to detonate meaning that it fragments into thousands of pieces of shrapnel which will guarantee the maximum amount of damage possible for a weapon of its size and weight.

Apparently, the guys who designed the original hand grenade also designed a grenade to fit into rifle barrels. They would be shot out of your rifle and travel a great deal further than the ordinary hand grenade would be able to. Also, distinguished by deep grooves in their surfaces, these rifle grenades were the progenitors to latter day mortar weapons, the kind you see being used in Syria, Afghanistan and all those other theatres of modern day warfare we are accustomed to seeing.

So, our art and design students learn that the weapons of choice of the early 20th century were designed in much the same way as the sewing machine or horse drawn cart: paying full attention to form, function and effectiveness. There may even have been aesthetic considerations at play when it came to designing the hand grenade although it’s hard to see what they were.

It’s also hard to imagine a thought process in which earnest young men and women would sit down at a table and engage in some blue sky thinking about what it would take to design the most effective hand grenade. Did they talk about body parts? Mortality rates? Bang for your buck? Or did they do it with one hand over their eyes, pretending not to know what they were doing and perhaps imagining a use for the hand grenade which didn’t involve blowing people to bits? Is there somewhere, in the Ministry of Defence, a portfolio of uses of hand grenades which weren’t deemed appropriate and so have been confined to the dustbins of history?

We shall probably never know that but one thing we do know is that the military industrial complex that is the far North West of England asks some pretty hard questions of its inhabitants and even harder ones of those who live far removed from its difficult debates about warfare, industry, education, design and jobs. Robert Wyatt’s ‘Ship Building’ has never been far from my mind recently: and like Robert, I have the advantage of living a long way away from the centre of these challenging and difficult questions.

Remembering Stuart Bastik: you say Immigrant, I say Potato.

You say immigrant, I say potato was first published on 28 August, 2015 as part of a blog capturing the Tracks of the Iron Masters project held across the Sustrans cycle tracks of West Cumbria.

Weeds for many of us are those plants which happen to find their way into the least desirable places on our front lawns, garden paths or back yards. There we are, sitting on our laurels feeling as pleased as punch with our manicured lawn or tidied up patch when out of the corner of our eye we spot a pesky little intruder which somehow managed to avoid our overzealous strimming and demonic poisoning and has survived against all the odds, cluttering up our neat and tidy view of what nature should be all about. We instantly name the intruder as a weed and set about trying to purge the landscape of it, its related cousins and anything else that could upset the ecological harmony we have established on our land.

Our efforts may be frequently in vain as the intruders tend to be hardy little plants who have experienced far more threats to their livelihood than the occasional misguided Black and Decker strimmer or undiluted paraquat. That weed, which you can’t help see out of the corner of your eye amidst the order you have created, has probably faced off predators, illegal chemicals, drunks out on the tiles looking for the nearest urination hotspot and far worse threats to its existence that you can conjure up in the safety of your potting shed. That solitary weed is here to stay and heaven help you if you think that you an dig it up, transplant it, snap it off at the prime of its life or dead head it. The weed will win every time.

Of course, if you decide that the fruit of that weed happens to make some rather tasteful jam which you can add to your tea time on the lawn, or its seeds happen to make that plastic white sliced loaf palatable, or its leaves when infused in boiling water for a few minutes provide you with a surprising pick you up tonic for the rest of the day, especially when combined with a drop of milk, a spoonful of sugar and a digestive biscuit, then you’ve not really got a weed on your hands at all. You’ve got the potential of a native crop.

So, next time you spot a weed or intruder out of your eye, just ask yourself whether its really as offensive as you think it is. It might just save your life in future.

Remembering Stuart Bastik: Nuclear and linguistic fusion on the Energy Coast.

Nuclear and Linguistic Fusion on the Energy Coast: first published in May 2015 as part of the Seldom Seen walks and talks across Morecambe Bay.

I’ve never been too happy to wander lonely as a cloud up hill and down dale but recent visits to Cumbria and Lancashire are providing me with the chance to explore some of Britain’s most beautiful coasts in the North West: although my early moments have already complicated that stereotype. There’s the huge ship building sheds of Barrow with its history celebrated in Japan; the bleak but impressive outlines of Sunderland Point and it’s sharp reminder of the British slave trade with Africa and the Caribbean of the 18th century; and the nearby nuclear demonology at Heysham Nuclear Power Station conjures up memories of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

For all its claim to being a rural idyll separated from the hurly and burly of city and corporate life, this part of the coast line has powerful international economic significance. Some say that were it not for Barrow’s nuclear submarine building capability, that Britain would find itself cast out of NATO and the G8 power block. The region is known as the energy coast and the preponderance of fission technology on those coast lines is one reason why and also a cause of intrigue and curiosity: why are nuclear power stations built in pairs? How many atoms are split every hour?

The moment you slip off the beaten tracks which connect fission technology to the nation’s defence policy and enter more isolated communities – which have themselves been subject to more than their fair share of societal fission in recent decades – the everyday language for the citizens of those communities shines as startling forms of linguistic flora and fauna.

Whammeling, Haff Netting and the Wynt are not only just great scrabble words but everyday expressions of fishermen and women whose families have lived in the region for over 5 generations. You double take as Nordic surfaces in the conversation and stories of fluorescent plankton disrupting a fathers fishing night spill out into the cold December air.

‘Did you catch anything dad?’ A son asked his father 70 years ago as he set about his nightly task of salmon fishing. ‘No, the nets were on fire’ was the disgusted reply from his dad when talking about the plankton that had coated his fishing net.

Nothing to do with nuclear spillage but the wonders of the industrial and linguistic terrain open up the possibility of some extra-terrestrial apparitions in the not too distant future. I’m still trying to figure out how many atoms were split over the course of the hour that I visited Heysham. Whatever the figure, it will be unimaginably large and no doubt involve several hundred zeroes in it somewhere: more than all the grains of the sand in the world someone says; more than all the Scousers in the world retorts someone else. Impossible, I answer back, but one thing is sure: the mysteries of atomic and linguistic fission won’t be easily solved by a few hours visiting the visitors centre of Heysham Nuclear Power Station.