We’re now well underway with regular programming for our podcast series, Absolute Units, hosted by MERL curator Ollie Douglas and myself, and supported by Arts Council England through our partnership with Reading Museum.

After our previous episodes with the fantastic environmental historian Dolly Jørgensen, this episode we speak with Bristol-based artist Scott, best-known online as Man in the Woods. We discuss Scott’s practice of exploring and documenting rural England, his art inspired by his walks and finds, and how this kind of process can help us to rethink and gently rebuild our sense of ourselves in contemporary 21st-century England.

To accompany the podcast episode, check out several of Man in the Woods’ artworks below that he generously provided this purpose. At the end, find links to follow Man in the Woods online, and see how you can support his work and our podcast.

We’re delighted to announce the award of a new MERL Fellowship to Dr Jo Clement, an award-winning poet and Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Northumbria!

In 2024, Clement collaborated with us to redesign our Making Rural England gallery, bringing the presence of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people into focus. She designed a new educational resource for schools accessing the exhibition and led on-site workshops exploring the museum with local Gypsy, Roma and Traveller school children.

Clement’s Fellowship project, The Long Road, will respond creatively to objects and textual material in the Robert Dawson Romany Collection. This collection spans 32 boxes and over 2,000 volumes of literature, ranging from sheet music and legislature to posters, cigarette cards, waggon plans, and a whole range of amazing artefacts.

Clement is an award-winning poet whose first collection, Outlandish (Bloodaxe, 2022), confronts Romantic impressions of British Gypsy ethnicity and lyrically lays them to rest. This Fellowship combines her practice and research-led interventions to decolonise archives and make materials more accessible to the public.

Below, hear from Clement about what her Fellowship will entail, and how you can take part in the months ahead.

The Long Road

My interdisciplinary Fellowship at The MERL offers valuable time and space to deepen my scholarly research into the representation of Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller people in museums and literature. With a practice-led approach, writing poems and creating short films in response to a selection of The MERL’s holdings, I aim to make what UNESCO terms Intangible Cultural Heritage tangible.

An important part of this research is making space for community-led interpretation and response. Everyone deserves a say on how our diverse ethnicities and our cultures are represented and labelled. And you’re invited!

I’ll host an interpretation workshop especially for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people on 16 April 2025. Together, we’ll discuss how the community is represented in this unfinished painting depicting life on the road and create our own collaborative museum label. My workshops are inclusive, safe spaces and you can join in-person or online. If you’re an individual or represent an organisation and would like to take part, please fill in this form to book a space. I can’t wait to meet you!

Summer feels a long way off, but in June we are officially launching the new exhibition The Long Road. This new permanent exhibition includes materials I’ve curated from the Robert Dawson Romany archive. I warmly invite you to come meet me at The MERL on 14 June 2025. Visit the exhibition and join in my zine making workshop. Together we’ll celebrate Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller History Month. There’ll be readings from new creative work and refreshments in the garden…if the weather holds up!

The MERL is one of my all-time favourite museums. Some highly unusual and truly tantalising objects are waiting to meet you here. Each one tells a different story about how rural England has transformed over the past many centuries.

I’m super proud to continue working with The MERL and spend time exploring all the fantastic holdings in the Robert Dawson archive during my Fellowship. The library collection alone is a treasure trove of the textual and visual materials Dawson diligently kept to help preserve our often misunderstood community.

The MERL truly deserves its Museum of Sanctuary status, which was awarded last year. The staff here are incredibly welcoming and supportive of my research. I can’t wait to spend more time with folks both in and beyond my community to celebrate cultural diversity and build a better understanding of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller contribution to this country’s rural past, present and vitally, future.

– Dr Jo Clement, MERL Fellow, 2025

Jo Clement is a working-class poet and interdisciplinary maker of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller ethnicity. A Northern Writers’ Award winner, they lecture in Creative Writing at Northumbria University.

BBC Radio appearances include Northern Drift, Poetry Please and Start the Week. ‘Paisley’ was featured on the London Underground as part of the bicentenary of Shelley’s death and was exhibited at the Scottish Poetry Library during the Edinburgh Festival. ‘Listen’ and ‘Existence’ were commissioned for the Memorial to Europe’s Sinti and Roma Murdered Under Nazism. ‘Chicken Blood’ was commissioned by WritersMosaic.

Shortlisted for the John Pollard International Poetry Prize and longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023, their highly acclaimed first poetry collection, Outlandish, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2022.