Every month Brave Island runs a Young Creative of the Month fund, where we spotlight a local young creative with an interview on our blog, and support them with funding of £100. For May, it’s Poet and visual artist Lewis Corry. This fund launches at the beginning of every month, you can apply to be Young Creative of the Month for June here.

Please can you tell us about your creative practice?

I’m a bit of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to art. I paint, I write, I perform whenever I can. I mostly just like making things that people think about, and building connections through art. I think that’s something you can do within any medium. Recently it’s been mostly writing – mostly poems to be a little more specific. I love performing. To work on something in isolation and then bring it out in front of a crowd of people is an incredible feeling – especially if they seem to enjoy it!

Your work involves a recurring theme of STEM, where did this inspiration come from?

They’re two sides of the same coin. Art is science and science is art, and, at their core both are trying to answer exactly the same questions. Who are we? Why are we here? How? Can things be better than this?

At least that’s how it seems for me. I get much the same feeling from discovering an elegant solution to a problem or finding out about some deep symmetry present in physics as I do looking at a piece of artwork I really love, or listening to music. If we consider the golden ratio – a pattern found in many of the greatest artistic feats – it boils down to nothing more than a mathematical sequence. Add together the two terms before you, and repeat until you reach infinity. Creative thinking is at the core of any new discovery . Art, I think, is a dialogue between people and the world around them. So if science is a way of understanding that world better, then surely it would add to the conversation.

Recently I’ve been fascinated by fractals. They’re these endlessly repeating patterns that seem to be intrinsic in maths, springing out of the very structure of logic, rather than any specific manipulation. As a first step in some projects I’ve got planned, I’ve written code to generate the Mandelbrot set and Siepinski’s gasket. It’s incredible, they both produce these beautiful, intricate shapes, seemingly out of nowhere. The maths behind each sequence is relatively simple, and yet these infinite patterns spring out of it.

What are your creative ambitions for 2024?

I have a lot of ideas for 2024 – it remains to be seen how many of them will come to fruition. I have plans (and hopes) for an art exhibit in the Summer, exploring our relationships with science and technology. It’ll incorporate robotics and code with more traditional art and (fingers crossed!) make for a really interesting exhibition. I’m really excited about some of the pieces I have planned for that.

I want to try and take my poetry a little further too. To perform as much as I can and get accepted into a proper grown-up competition. The issue with turning 17 it would seem, is that suddenly you’re too old for most of the children’s competitions, and the adult ones, I have discovered, are a much harsher playing field.

Where can people find your work if they’d like to support you?

My instagram @spacemonkeypoetry is currently a barren wasteland of unharnessed potential, which is to say, I’m chronically offline. So you’d have to hunt me down through more traditional means.

I’m a member of the VEX poetry collective, so chances are if something has the VEX logo it also has me! Similarly, I’m trying to infiltrate as many venues as I possibly can at the Ventnor Fringe this year (book bus down!) so keep an eye out and I’ll probably crop up.

I’m also currently working on launching a poetry and literature zine alongside some of my fellow Foyle’s young poets of the year. The insta tag is @symbioticazine. It’s currently more of a watch-this-space page, but it’ll likely end up a lot more active than my personal account!