Artist & Poet, Independent
Biography
John Bolland is a writer, artist and performer based in the North East of Scotland. Originally qualified in Chemistry, John worked in a range of roles in the offshore oil & gas development and operations between 1981 and 2013 including project management, operations planning, governance and high-level relationship management. A life-long writer with a strong interest in the arts and earth sciences, John left the industry in 2014 to pursue his career in the arts. His strong focus on issues of inter-generational, corporate and individual responsibility led to an active involvement in Climate Activism between 2017 and 2019. The experience, especially blue-collar experience, of work in the oil & gas industry has been a consistent feature of his work over the last two decades culminating in his latest collection – Pibroch – which explores parallels between the Piper Alpha disaster of 1988 and the Climate Emergency. John’s current projects focus on deep time, inter-generational linkages and the pinch of the present: he believes “it will be necessary to re-imagine the past in order to imagine a future”. John graduated from Glasgow University’s M.Litt programme in 2005 and is a Director of the Scottish Writers Centre. He currently has five grandchildren.
Selected publications
Pibroch – Red Squirrel Press 2021
The Poetics of Climate Change – Earthlines, Scottish Geology Trust, October 2021 Eds. Patrick Corbett, Norman Bissell, Philip Ringrose, Sarah Tremlett, Brian Whalley
Blur Times – Presented as part of Earth Lines – Geopoetry and Geopoetics 2020
Fallen Stock – Red Squirrel Press 2019
