Experience four distinctive poetic voices from different generations responding to Cecily Brown’s Picture Making.
To mark the closing weekend of Picture Making, Cecily Brown’s first major exhibition at a UK public institution in over twenty years, Serpentine presents an afternoon of poetry with Rachael Allen, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Karen McCarthy Woolf and Lemn Sissay.
Known for her vigorous brushwork, vivid colour and dynamic compositions, Brown has made new and recent paintings inspired by Serpentine’s unique location in Kensington Gardens, a place of longstanding personal significance to the artist. For Brown, gardens and park life become sites of memory, movement and imagination, while recurring motifs including woodland scenes, amorous couples and uncanny walks explore the shifting boundaries between bodies and the natural world.
This afternoon of readings offers a chance to encounter a range of perspectives inspired by the exhibition’s wider themes and its garden surroundings.
The informal drop-in event takes place inside Serpentine’s 2026 Pavilion, designed by LANZA atelier. Its form, materiality and architectural language draw on English garden traditions and vernacular building practices, creating a setting that connects the gallery, the Pavilion and the park.
Curated and produced by:
Dominik Czechowski, Curator, Live Programmes, and Lucia Fortune-Ely, Producer, Live Programmes
Poets
Rachael Allen is the author of God Complex and Kingdomland, both published by Faber. She works as an editor for Fitzcarraldo Editions and a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London.
Dr Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is a writer whose work focuses largely on the environment. Her books include the nature-writing Twelve Words for Moss and The Grassling, the poetry collections Of Sea and Swims, and literary criticism. Twelve Words for Moss was shortlisted for the Wainwright and Jhalak Prizes and named a Sunday Times and Countryfile Book of the Year. She is a Guardian Country Diarist and author of the novel Splendour (2026).
Lemn Sissay is a poet, playwright, memoirist and broadcaster. He has performed around the world from The Library of Congress in the United States and the National Theatre of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa to The London Palladium. His television documentaries have been nominated for Grierson BAFTA and RTS awards. His work in radio has been nominated for Sony and Palme d’Ors.
Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf, FRSL, has written three poetry collections and a T S Eliot Prize-shortlisted verse novel Top Doll. As a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA’s Promise Institute for Human Rights she wrote Unsafe: a ‘taut’ and ‘hypnotic’ (Guardian) poetic meditation on the sacred, the city and our access to nature. She holds a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award and the Jerwood Prize for Poetry. Her work has been exhibited on London Underground; produced as opera, animation and dance; and dropped from a helicopter over the Houses of Parliament in a poetry ‘bombing’ by the Chilean collective Casagrande.
