Fully Booked

Fully Booked is a mixed-media, collaborative exhibition on the written word and all its forms. Text as art, books as sculpture, words as beauty; Fully Booked pushes the boundaries of how you perceive your reading material. Local, national and international artists to include Anthony Champa, Diana Champa, Suzanne Coates, Andrew Haire, Karishma Kusurkar, Kata Kiss and Jemma Robinson will be working collaboratively with writer Caroline Healy to showcase their work at the gallery space. 
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Project background

'Fully Booked came about after submitting to the exhibition Papergirl 2013.
My creative writing could be classed as experimental. I like playing with the layout, working the blank space on the page, as much as crafting the words themselves. To me, writing has a twofold artistic impact, the structure, form and beauty of the words but also how the text looks on the page. I like to give the reader a double experience, to push the boundaries of their perception of literature as a one dimensional art form.

In seeing the space and diversity at the Papergirl exhibition I began to think about text and its forms, about visual art, my own work and the links I had made with other artists. When I am not writing I work as a community arts project coordinator. I have had the good fortune to coordinate a number of interesting arts projects working with textile artists, visual artists, painters and traditional crafts professionals. The notion to work on a collaborate arts project took off from there. Fully Booked seemed like a perfect opportunity to indulge my own curiosity and as an impetus to work with multicultural, multidiscipline artists.
And I have to say, I’ve not been disappointed.

Like most things in life, and definitely for this project, it seems to be a number of external factors collided to bring about its inception. The same can be said for my writing, a number of factors imploded leading me to a moment of creative lucidity. I have a background in project management and content delivery. I have always written for my professional career, technical documents, reports, findings, display and exhibition content. Creative writing was the next step for me in terms of developing my skill and progressing in a more artistic and curiosity-driven direction. In a moment of madness-induced-clarity, I enrolled to do my Masters in Creative Writing at Queen’s University, Belfast and I have never looked back. That programme exposed me to a number of influences, it allowed me time and space to explore the notion of creative writing (what IS creative writing; can you not argue that all writing is creative?).
And thus began my lessons in writing, art, literature and a personal challenge to explore all of these and more.

Fully Booked is the perfect platform to work collaboratively, to create and challenge perception. It has been a very exciting process to collude with other artists and to see how we can interweave different art forms to create a hybrid art; something that will engage the viewer and stimulate conversation and perhaps debate.'
Text: Caroline Healy

Caroline Healy is a writer, creative writing tutor and community arts facilitator. She recently completed her Masters at Queen’s University, Belfast at the Seamus Heaney Centre. She published her first award winning collection of short stories, entitled A Stitch in Time in August 2012. Her work has been featured in publications such as Wordlegs, The Bohemyth, Prole and the Irish Writers’ Centre Lonely Voice, as well as on Short Story Ireland, Five Stop Story and Short Story U.K.
She writes literary fiction and young adult fiction, with her book Blood Entwines long listed at the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair and Cornerstones Literary Consultancy WowFactor 2013. Readings on both sides of the Atlantic, in Ireland, the U.K and at The Brooklyn Book Festival were part of her literary undertakings in 2013. Caroline is completing her second short story collection, The House of Water due for release in conjunction with an exhibition called Fully Booked at the Belfast Book Festival 2014. She is published by Bloomsbury Publishing.

Jan Carson completed a BA in English Literature in Queens University, Belfast, and a Masters in Literature in Theology and Contemporary Culture. Jan is a Community Arts Development Officer in the Ulster Hall in Belfast. She has led many creative writing workshops and read extensively in Britain, Ireland and the United States. She runs a monthly literary event at the Ulster Hall which has showcased Irish writers such as Jennifer Johnston, Glenn Patterson and Ciaran Carson.

Michael Nolan is 23 years old from Belfast. He graduated from LJMU BA in Creative Writing in 2011 and Queen’s University Creative Writing MA in 2012 with Distinction. He was editor of In The Red Magazine’s ninth issue, won the Avalon Prize for Poetry in 2011 and had a short story, ‘Linking’ published by Dead Ink. Currently represented by Sam Copeland of Rogers, Coleridge and White.

Gerard Brennan
'I live in Dundrum, Northern Ireland, with my wife, Michelle and our kids, Mya, Jack and Oscar. My short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies; most recently The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 8. I co-edited Requiems for the Departed, a collection of crime fiction based on Irish myths which won the 2011 Spinetingler Award for best anthology. My novella, The Point, will be published by Pulp Press in October 2011.'

Kelly Creighton
'I am Kelly Creighton, a Belfast born writer and editor currently residing in Co Down with my husband and four children.
I write poetry, prose and plays, reviews and interviews.
Lapwing Publications published my debut poetry collection Three Primes, September 2013. My work has been featured in numerous literary magazines, print and online, including: The Stinging Fly, Cyphers, Long Story Short, Literary Orphans, Wordlegs, Crannog, The Galway Review, The Bohemyth, A New Ulster, Ink Sweat and Tears, Boyne Berries, Skylight 47, The Poetry Bus, Poethead, PEN Austria’s protest e-book, Whiskey Paper, Synaesthesia Magazine, The Pygmy Giant, Papergirl Belfast, The Pink Mist, translated for Recours au Poeme and elsewhere. I am one of the founding members of The Square Circle Writers’ group in Ards Arts.'

Emma Must (born 1966) is an English environmental activist, teacher, and poet, who previously worked as a librarian.
She was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1995 for her efforts on land protection, particularly her influence on British road building policies through her road protest against the M3 motorway extension at Twyford Down.
Must went on to work with Alarm UK!,[3] (an umbrella group for the nationwide road building protest), Transport 2000 (later renamed Campaign for Better Transport) and World Development Movement.