A new exhibition using verbatim prison poetry to share the lived experience of people serving indeterminate sentences opens in Chester Cathedral this week.
Seeing Life Wounded Souls – Chester Cathedral – 11 to 25 October
Seeing Life Wounded Souls has been curated by former prison chaplain Revd Dr David Kirk Beedon, drawing on his doctoral research to expose what he describes as the “Kafkaesque” reality faced by more than 2,000 people still held under the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence.
The exhibition highlights the moral injustices of a sentence that was abolished in 2012 and which Prime Minister Andy Burnham has vowed to finish for good. Yet thousands remain in custody, many long after completing the recommended and reasonable tariff for their offence.
The exhibition combines posters and poems. Each poster tells the life story of one of the IPP men Revd Dr Beedon interviewed, using a distinctive life-history method called Life as a Film, in which participants describe their lives as if they were a film.
The poems are drawn from 25 hours of raw interview transcripts and become moving poetic testimonies of life under an indeterminate sentence, using the men’s own words throughout.
Seeing Life Wounded Souls runs at Chester Cathedral from 11 to 25 October.
Revd Dr Beedon will give a talk on the exhibition after Evensong at 4pm on Sunday 11 October.
The exhibition will then travel to Leicester Cathedral for the month of March 2027. The full tour programme is yet to be finalised, and updates will be posted on Facebook here.
