A Cornish poet is a part of an academic first uniting creative people with university boffins to drive ground-breaking research.

Bringing together three creative practitioners with three academic hosts, this year’s set of Creative Fellowships at the University of Exeter see the worlds of law, maritime history and environmental justice collide with multidisciplinary art and poetry.

Developed by the University’s Arts and Culture team in 2018, the fellowships provide a platform upon which creative practitioners can embed themselves into ground-breaking research at the University, lasting a total of five weeks across the academic year.

For the first time, two of the Fellowships will be based solely at the University’s Penryn campus in Cornwall.

Cornwall-born poet and artist Ella Frears is collaborating with Dr Timothy Cooper from the Centre for Environmental Arts and Humanities on ‘Maritime Environmental Histories: Oral Histories and Creative Conversations’. The fellowship will see Ella working in a community context to connect historical experiences of environmental change in Falmouth and Penryn to contemporary concerns regarding rising sea levels, dredging, and the future of sea-food fisheries.

Ella said: "I’m looking forward to interrogating the role of the poet when exploring aspects of the climate crisis. Mineshafts, pedestrianisation, oil spills, and tourism in Cornwall, are just some of the areas I’ll be delving into and discussing with Dr Cooper."

Multidisciplinary artist Daksha Patel is working with Professor Clare Saunders from the Department for Humanities and Social Sciences, Cornwall on ‘Exploring Environmental Justice’, a social movement which aspires to put justice for people, organisms and eco-systems at the heart of solutions to environmental problems.

Together they will look at themes that can feed into the department's new Environmental Humanities BA programme.