South Australian ceramic artist Ellis Moseley supplied an image for this special issue
‘Poetry to the Rescue’. Moseley works primarily in ceramic installation. His work
addresses concepts with issues of child protection, human rights and societal
norms. Many of his sculptural works use pastel hues to address themes of subverted
rites of passage, the taking of innocence, and faltering kindness. Many of the poems
in this issue address a variety of cultural issues, and many are ‘deliberately eclectic:
by turns, direct and abstract, formally traditional and experimental’ (Coleman 2021).
Book reviews, essays and a themed article provide readers with particular concepts
and ideas and research evidence on a variety of poetic literature. The ceramic piece
by Ellis Moseley seems fitting for this issue, the cover image is a photograph of a
vessel made using terracotta plus a Buff Raku Trachyte blend with a surface
material of Mid Fire Quartz. For me the work feels and looks like torn paper and
reminds me of the pages used by poets writing their poems, reworked and reworked
with these the discarded fragments. But to the artist the issue explored in this
ceramic work is the ‘commodification of the mind by the big data driven tech
companies’, that asks the question what is the mind-body problem, or what is the
nature of consciousness, and is a part of a series of works to be exhibited at Linden
New Art Gallery, South Australia in early 2022.