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Description of work'Using Indian Ink "A la Pagode" because I love it. It's my favourite ink, very dark and rich'
Black Page 23
Description of work'Using Indian Ink "A la Pagode" because I love it. It's my favourite ink, very dark and rich'
Black Page 22
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Description of work'Using Xerox of Sterne's bust I have at home, plus two different kind of markers for the black because nothing ever perseveres, not even blackness, so it is normal that after 250 years the black in the Black Page is beginning to show something or someone.'
Black Page 21
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Description of work'Using watercolour on soaked and stretched paper secured with 'butchers tape' (seen on edges after being razored off drawing board -) this being the conventional process for watercolour painting, and mine too -'
Black Page 20
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'Using Hogarth's black page from Marriage-a-la-Mode 1743-5. "'Tis no uncommon thing, my good Sancho, for one half of the world to use the other half of it like brutes, and then endeavour to make 'em so."
Laurence Sterne to Ignatius Sancho 1766.
Black Page 19
Description of work'Using writing and celluloid because at first sight there seems to be little in common between Laurence Sterne and James Frazer. But both wrote monumental works incapable of completion. 'The Golden Bough' is, of course, not exactly appreciated for its humour. Yet I cannot help thinking that the founding notion of this life-work - A Key To All Mythologies - is inherently droll. And certainly the unexpected juxtapositions in the Index volume are an occasional source of laughter. As Frazer is now appreciated, if at all, more as a prose stylist rather than a theorist of anthropological verities, I have let stand one obvious , but rather irresistible, error in the text.'
Black Page 18
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Description of workUsing aquatint etching on copper because, if you are using black, etching is the ultimate expression of blackness
Black Page 17
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Description of work'Using a photograph of ED Morel's anti-war tract 'Truth and War' (1916) because no fiction, not even Tristram Shandy, could necessarily anticipate the emergence of the 'black art' of propaganda as practised by the modern state. The pink markers reflect my search for references to Winston Churchill - considered by Morel to be, or to have become, a dreadful mythmaker during the Great War, and therefore a 'personal force for evil' against which he was pleased to stand in the General Election of 1922.'
Black Page 16
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Description of work'Using paper and sound because the three marks punctuating the Black Page are the waveforms of the sounds of the words 'Alas, poor Yorick', as spoken by the composer. These words were chosen as it has been known for publishers to entirely ignore the existence of the Black Page, with nothing apart from these words - taken from the end of page 72.
Here the BLACKNESS surrounding these marks represents the silence surrounding the utterance of these words. However, on closer inspection, one can see small anomalies on the marks and the Black Page reminding us that noise (visual and acoustic) is ubiquitous : there is no such thing as silence.
Interestingly this visual-acoustic language reveals, with some clarity, more than the construction of these words through time : the intense white section at the end of the first mark is the super-sibilant white noise of the 's' from the end of 'alas'; the roundness of the second mark ('poor') gives us a hint as to the composer's origins (North Riding of Yorkshire); and the final, disjointed blip - short, sharp, percussive - is the 'ck' from 'Yorick'.
Black Page 15
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Description of work'Using screen printed acrylic ink. I am a printmaker and serigraphy is my principal medium. This is a screen printed monoprint. It is three layers of black, each layer having a blend down the middle of blue-black against the brown black of the rest. The first layer had a white star for Sterne, which has been almost obliterated by the next two layers. The second layer kept another star which had been present on the first layer, and which the third layer has disguised but not hidden. If I had done the layers in a different order the result would have been different, in what was revealed and what was hidden, but the content be the same.'
Black Page 14
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Description of work'Using watercolour, Lamp Black and Natural Tint. This is after a haiku by Yosa Buson "being asked for an inscription over a picture of a black dog"
Pitch darkness of its own body
Has barked
Midnight autumn
A contemporary of Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), Yosa Buson (1716 -1784) was a painter and haiku poet, is only considered on a par with Basho.'
Black Page 13
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Description of work'Using pastel, acrylic, language because of a
Cancelled Window
through a slate dish
I burrow
for pores of secret scent
atomised from a stoppered bottle
the door to
a sea-drowned city,
5000 souls re-membered, too late
the shape of the search
in negative, as the electric
bell sounds like a needle in cream,
a grave photograph, still cooking
the parrot with his bent beak
he's not dead, Sir, he's blind.
Black Page 12
(This is the design for the quilt that is on view at the exhibition at Shandy Hall)
Description of work
'The patchwork quilt-top was sewn by Alice King (who worked on theWomen's Work quilt with me), and comprises exactly 73 pieces. There are 18 off-white pure silk log cabin pieces around the edge and 55 black pieces in various different fabrics making up the lettered section. The patchwork was constructed using the card template technique. Each piece is cut out in card, and the fabric lightly tacked around it to form the flat, irregular patchwork shape. Thepieces are then sewn in place by hand from the wrong side with small overstitches before the card templates are removed from the back, along with the rough holding-stitches. The log cabin strips have been sewn on by machine. The quilting stitches (which hold the three layers together) are done by Alice Wood, by hand. The log cabin strips and quilt backing are remnants of raw Thai silk which came from the makerof Alice Wood’s wedding dress. The batting is 100% cotton and was leftover from one of my own previous quilts. The black pieces are from the two Alices' fabric collections, and consist of silk taffeta, jacquard cotton sateen, velvet, flocked chiffon and satin.'
Black Page 11
Description of work'Using AutoLISP (via AutoCAD), Rhino3D, Bunkspeed Hypershot.
My source material for the Black Page was the entire text of Tristram Shandy, which was re-formatted to neatly fill the 'black' area while avoiding the use of hyphenated word-breaks. While working with the text I became fascinated by the variability of Sterne's spelling, and his skilful avoidance of seemingly common words. To illustrate this I wrote a program to represent each word as a solid vertical column, whose height was determined by its uniqueness within the book, and its width by the length of the word. As many words shared equal levels of rarity, I condensed the range down to 267 discrete levels to produce a more visually pleasing result. This created a three-dimensional landscape resembling a high-rise city of narrow monoliths, with 'The' (10,297 occurences) at ground level, and 'Godlike' (1 occurence) towering above the rest.
It seemed appropriate from the outset to draw the viewer's attention to each occurence of the word 'black' within the text, while somehow maintaining an overall darkness to the final page. To achieve this I extended each of the 36 'black' columns vertically upward and rendered them as the sole light sources in the model. The faint glow around each of these is the result of light catching the edges of surrounding word columns during the final rendering process.'
Black Page 9
Description of work'Using Rotated Postcard because Barn Owl photographed by Eric Hosking in 1948 has been watching me as I write for the last four years. For me, the instant 'illumination' it provides has been a great source of focus in the snowblind of the 'Blank Page' = 'Black Page'. It all depends on how you look at a thing doesn't it?
Black Page 8
Description of work'Using ink because Patrick Wildgust of Shandy Hall asked very nicely.'
Black Page 7
Description of workI have designed my black page around the wrong event. It commemorates Yorick's first meeting with Death and not his second. However this should in no way devalue your investment which in the long run should prove as sound as your pension pot. My design is taken from the portrait of Sterne by Patch at Jesus College, Cambridge. The black used is my regular drawing ink -Sennelier - whether it proves blacker than the blacks of my co-exhibitors is neither here nor there. The shape created solidifies the pictorial space between the protagonists - Yorick's
hospitable welcome proves a radical solution to an age old problem. It also emphasises the metaphysical space between life and death. Lax scholars unfamiliar with the original will perceive only an amusing shape set in relation to a much smaller and far less amusing one intruding from the bottom left. Due to difficulties relating to failing eyesight my first attempt has been inexpertly cut and collaged onto a second sheet. Although vaguely irritating you might just learn to live with it - much like death itself then. Here I must leave you.
Black Page 5
Description of work:
I found these [ http://www.globe-shop.com/item.asp?itemid=5222 ] pencils for sale at the The Globe Theatre's online shop -- inscribed like the marble tombstone of Sterne's Yorick -- which come complete with a pewter skull atop their wooden shaft instead of the usual eraser. My black page drawing used one such red pencil in its entirety. All the shavings and chipped lead, the remains, are gathered in a transparent 15ml urn. The drawing was complete when the pencil couldn't be sharpened anymore. The skull, and the remaining stump of wood that it is impaled upon, form the lid of the urn. Although bruised the rag paper just survived the scratching.
Black Page 4
Description of work'Using tar because black never fades, never dries, never stops moving, always spreads and seeps.'
Black Page 3
Description of work
'Using Tristram Shandy and the King James Bible because both can be taken to offer a sense of totality. The page starts with the beginning of each text and ends with their last lines. Each line adds another copy of the texts until the midpoint is reached, when a line of text is subtracted from each subsequent line on the page. Theoretically the whole of each text is present. In an analogous sense the page contains everything that has happened and can happen. In this sense the black represents the accumulation of all thought and activity that fills the white void of the blank page.'
'Using Tristram Shandy and the King James Bible because both can be taken to offer a sense of totality. The page starts with the beginning of each text and ends with their last lines. Each line adds another copy of the texts until the midpoint is reached, when a line of text is subtracted from each subsequent line on the page. Theoretically the whole of each text is present. In an analogous sense the page contains everything that has happened and can happen. In this sense the black represents the accumulation of all thought and activity that fills the white void of the blank page.'
Black Page 2
Description of work'Using the stub of a Winsor and Newton pencil because the rest of it was used by my friend John Nash'
Black Page 1
'Using magazine cuttings - working in collage, I sometimes get interesting off-cuts left over from the things I cut out. The negative shape of what's left behind often reveals more about what's been taken away than the thing itself'
This year is the 250th anniversary of the publication of the first two volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne.
On page 72 of Volume I the reader is informed of the death of the character Parson Yorick with the words Alas! poor Yorick. The opposite page [ 73 ] has the space that the text should occupy filled with black.
The Incline Press has impressed the outline of the original page onto a sheet of A4 handmade Somerset paper and the page number [73] has been printed and the proportions of the rectangle outlined.
73 artists/writers have agreed to make a new Black Page on this printed paper for exhibition in the gallery at Shandy Hall in September 2009. All the Black Pages will be for sale and all will be visible on this blog.
On page 72 of Volume I the reader is informed of the death of the character Parson Yorick with the words Alas! poor Yorick. The opposite page [ 73 ] has the space that the text should occupy filled with black.
The Incline Press has impressed the outline of the original page onto a sheet of A4 handmade Somerset paper and the page number [73] has been printed and the proportions of the rectangle outlined.
73 artists/writers have agreed to make a new Black Page on this printed paper for exhibition in the gallery at Shandy Hall in September 2009. All the Black Pages will be for sale and all will be visible on this blog.
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