In June 2002 Frieda Hughes was given an Invention and Innovation award by NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) for her project FORTY YEARS. This project was to produce forty abstract paintings which would be based on forty poems, one representing each of the first forty years of her life. The idea was to explore the emotional impact of each year on the canvas while the poems would be the 'key' to the abstraction. As the project progressed, Frieda added five more paintings and poems to bring the project up to her forty-fifth year.


The poems are finished and the paintings are completed. The result is a four foot high, two hundred and twenty-five foot long painting in forty-five panels, which is an abstract landscape of the first forty-five years of her life. You can view this below.


Harper Collins (US) will publish the poems of 'Forty-Five' in December 2006. Bloodaxe Books (UK) will publish both the poems and the paintings in April 2007.