Vessels of Love 2026: love in abundance and decay

Vessels of Love 2026 presents love in abundance and decay through poetic works by Australian artists with artistic directions by The Salons.

Discover this collection of poetry films and spoken word recordings in a range of serendipitous spaces, including inner city bars and window galleries, online and radio broadcast programs at the gala launch performance and screening event at the Knox Street Bar.

Vessels of Love is an annual poetry program presented by Poetry Sydney that seeks to explore ideas and forms of love over the week of Valentine’s Day, 8-14 February. 

This year’s program focuses thematically on love’s forces of abundance and decay through the poetic works of seven Australian artists: Faye Couros, Willo Drummond, Martin Edmond, Ethan Price (Ester McDonald), Pooja Mittal Biswas, Michele Seminara, and through the guardianship of Lenore Bassan, Minnie Agnes Filson (1898-1971).

Moving through gothic folktale, autobiography, eco-poetics, found poetry, magical realism, body horror and absurdism, Vessels of Love 2026 channels worlds where love sustains and destroys, feeds on itself, and creates its own environment. Harnessing poetry’s reach into film, sound and visual art, the collection captures love as a living, shifting force: love is perpetual motion, existing between the overwhelming richness of connection and the inevitable transformations of time. Rather than resolving the tension between abundance and decay, these works inhabit it: the two are dance partners, each giving the other meaning, each making the other possible. Together, they occupy the space between what love is and what it does—between symbolism and lived experience, memory and fiction, the personal and the mythic. 

Each of the films featured in the Vessels of Love 2026 poetry film collection are made in collaboration between this year’s feature artists and The Salons, with the following guest artists: printmaker Lenore Bassan (for Challenge), and collage artist Deby Cann (for æther).

The full collection of poetry films and spoken word recordings will be available to enjoy online. Selected works appear in a range of spaces: visit Knox St Bar, Chippendale for Poetry Sydney’s Exhibition Program (featuring the Poem Phone and street window Poetry Gallery) and Intelligent Animal’s DIP window gallery in Darlington.

Presented by Poetry Sydney and The Salons with associative partners, the Knox Street Bar, intelligent animal, and media sponsor Eastside Radio.

Poetry Sydney acknowledges First Nations peoples as the sovereign custodians of Country, and pay respect to Elders of past, present and to future generations. We value the distinct culture, customs and practices present in the many and diverse tribal nations across Australia.

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