5 things to know about Iris Colomb

Her poetry output has ranged from the more conventional chapbooks and pamphlets to the less straight-forward mediums of performance art, scrolls, wrapped bolts and wooden spools. 

But whatever the medium, at the root of Colomb’s work is a want to explore the relationships between visual and verbal forms of text. And from July 2025 to January 2026 she brought together this pursuit of new poetic possibilities in her debut solo exhibition, Try! Try! Try! Again! at our National Poetry Library.

As this exhibition opened we put together this little primer to offer those of you yet to encounter Colomb, a little more background on the London-based performer. 

She likes to merge different art forms

Colomb’s background is in visual art and graphic design, having first found her passion for the arts and artistry through theatre. As she herself explains, ‘I’ve always been most excited by works which fall between disciplines and most of my projects are hybrids between various art forms of art and poetry; this includes performance as well as visual art, and musical improvisation’. With her interest in poetry being one that is much more centred on listening rather than reading, much of Colomb’s poetry is written with performance – including both audio and visual elements – in mind.

Collaboration is central to her practice

Colomb sees the broader experimental poetry community as playing a huge role in the development of her practice, and so it’s perhaps unsurprising that a significant amount of her artistic output involves collaboration. She is one half of two separate two-pieces; the double-act Soft Play with artist Paul Ingram which meanders between poetry, performance art and slapstick comedy; and text-sound duo [something’s happening] with musician Daryl Worthington. She is also part of improvising trios Small Print Drama (with Douglas Benford and Tom Ward) and TheThreeFeet (with John Bisset and Andrew Ciccone), and a member of London Improvisers Orchestra.

Beyond these recurring roles, her other collaborative works include her projects with artist and rigger Nik ‘Yourknots’ Nightingale including What We Hold which saw Colomb reading poetry whilst suspended upside down from a goalpost. And more recently her multiple collaborations at Deptford open-mic night Skronk, which have been transcribed and collected for her 2023 pamphlet Ridiculous Unlikely Attempt.

 

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She believes in trying, trying and trying again

The name of her solo exhibition is not without reason. For Colomb, ‘discomfort is an inherent part of performance practice and I find that really interesting. Overcoming the fear or failure has been a massive part of the development of my practice’. For someone who first began performing their poetry at open mic nights, such fear has a very real presence, and Colomb has said that every week for the first five months of her poetry performance career she dreaded getting on stage. But that experience, and getting past it, has helped drive her practice, as she adopted a rule of saying ‘yes’ whenever she was asked to do something she’d never done before; ‘I wanted to do as many of the things I was afraid of as quickly as possible to eradicate the fear’. 

This notion of getting beyond fear also translates into Colomb’s work. She is, in her words, ‘interested in what lies beyond discomfort, disgust and embarrassment,’ and several of her pieces have been marked by this idea of diving into forms of discomfort, be that physically like the pieces in which she read upside down or while standing on a balance board, or mentally, like her response to Joyce’s Ulysses, Where Do You Begin This, or through diving into improvisation. ‘I really believe that embarrassment can be domesticated,’ explains Colomb, ‘that it can become a familiar feeling we learn to accept, which then allows us to do things we didn’t expect to be capable of’.

And she believes that the best response to art is often laughter

Humour plays an important part in Colomb’s practice, with many of her projects tied to ideas she finds absurd. ‘I like to do things which are very silly really seriously,’ she explains, ‘to commit to them until they expand into something bigger and stranger’. Several of her projects actually emerged from a joke or an absurd dare, and grew from there; ‘the more absurd something is the more excited I get about doing it’. This can be seen in her performance piece Spittings – in which I Colomb spits into a book and reads what falls within the resulting stain – and also in two of her works created in response to the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns; Soak, in which Colomb performed in her bathtub for three hours, and Sediments, in which she labelled and mounted the growing collection of cigarette butts in her garden, carefully following the techniques deployed in insect taxidermy.

She is no fan of the ‘poet as genius’ trope

‘I don’t like the idea of poetry being an enigma the poet holds the key to and that few can solve,’ says Colomb. As such her performances often aim to upset the traditional hierarchy between poet and reader, or performer and audience members, and to maintain this disruption she tries to keep her writing open to interpretation, leaving space for the audience to make their own conclusions. Taking this further Colomb will also often ‘produce performances that make it clear to the audience that I’m discovering the outcome of the performance with them, or involve risks which produce a form of uncertainty for me as well as for them’.