So the WrapperRhyme exhibition DID happen!
It happened at STAnza, Scotland’s poetry festival in St Andrews.
It happened while gatherings of people were still going ahead (though nobody coughed or sneezed).
How lucky we were! One week later and we would have been scuppered.
I hope the photo-gallery on this page will show some of the preparations (I haven’t done this before). The strings of regular-sized WrapperRhymes were suspended in the display area of Innes’s bookshop. Outsizes and ‘rebels’ were in folders.
There were typed versions to read as well (since many rhymers have colossally illegible handwriting) in the folders.
The 3D Wrappers (e.g. boxes of tissues, cheese, chocolates and tubs of ice-cream) were on shelves.
There was a corner for Tunnock’s products alone, and a chair to sit in while writing your own rhyme and pinning it to the board supplied (lots of people did this).
Or if you preferred, you could sit in the boat. It was challenging getting that boat up (and down) the stairs, but we thought it was worth it.
Jenny Elliott and I orchestrated two talks on the WrapperRhymes, and some rhymers came along to read their rhymes (once they had located them, in the air or in a folder). At the end of each talk, the audience sang a WrapperRhyme about tinned tomatoes to the tune of Tom Jones’s version of ‘Delilah’. They sang with such gusto that book-buyers downstairs were slightly alarmed.
Now the exhibition is dismantled so I am in process of boxing and labelling everything and putting it in plastic boxes, which will go into our roof space. Ultimately they will be housed with the HappenStance archives in The National Library of Scotland. So if your WrapperRhyme is in there, a bit of you will be saved for posterity, fully identified and catalogued. They should be there long after Covid-19 is a distant (albeit painful) memory.
We had some merry merchandise too, including WrapperRhyme bookmarks and WrapperRhyme beermats. If you order anything from the website, you’re highly likely to find one of each in your parcel.
Huge thanks to everybody who contributed. It was wonderful.
And I have just eaten my FIRST Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer Biscuit. It took a surprisingly long time to chew. I saved the wrapper,
It’s been great to read the rhymes shared across social media and to feel part of a big, bonkers project! Thank you for it. Your rhymes were consistently the best.
Thanks for sharing the pictures Nell, I couldn’t go to Stanza so had been unable to envisage how on earth you were going to display them all! A bonkers but brilliant project.