The Songs The Morning Sang at the Portico Library

The Portico Library welcomes a joyful combination of words and images in The Songs The Morning Sang. The display is the result of a long-term collaboration between Ian McMillan and Andrew Brooks, rooted in observational romanticism and a shared love for early morning walks.

Ian McMillan is a poet, playwright and broadcaster, known as the bard of Barnsley. He lives in his hometown of Darfield in South Yorkshire which continues to inspire new verses and creative wordplay that he regularly shares on social media.

Andrew Brooks is a photographer of landscapes, cityscapes and everyday details of our environments. Citing Romantic painting as a key inspiration, he captures his chosen locations with the aim of communicating the feelings they inspire.

Their collaboration started organically, with Brooks reading McMillan’s poetic tweets describing moments from his daily pre-dawn walk. Brooks began his own routine of 5am strolls, taking pictures within two miles of his front door and paying attention to the smallest details. Afterwards, he shared the photographs with McMillan who created imagined narratives for the scenes and the creative partnership flourished, with a free-flowing process where each artist contributed his unique interpretation of the world.

The Songs The Morning Sang features 25 collaborative pieces: a traditional phone box lit dramatically by a red neon or traffic light, a flooded playground in blinding sunlight, a snow-covered street at the back of a row of terraces. Mundane details that we encounter on a daily basis are elevated to moments of transcendence and captured at that most magical time of day, hovering between alertness and the haziness of sleep.

There is another aspect of the collaboration too. Brooks and McMillan spent five months immersed in the Portico Library collection of over 25,000 books: they each picked out images and words that stood out to them and reworked those to create new compositions and narratives in the form of collages.

The Songs The Morning Sang is a love letter to the world outside our windows. We could all do with a little more awe in our lives – after seeing the show, you might just want to try a 5am walk yourself.