cover image for 'Creative Criticism, An Anthology and Guide' (2014) by Stephen Benson and Claire Connors

cover image without text

materials - sanded guitar, wooden hand, brass gas lamp stand, dolls house spiral staircase, wooden pear, blue laminate

dimensions: guitar 95cm x 35cm x 10cm
lamp stand 65cm x 45cm x 12cm

We were approached to respond to a text by Sarah Wood called 'Anew Again'*. The text is itself a response to several  stimuli - Picasso's 'Construction au joueur de guitare' (1913),   Picasso's 'The Old Guitarist' (1903-04), Wallace Stevens 'Man with the Blue Guitar' (1937) and Rilke's 'Sonnet to Orpheus' (1922) among others. Writing 'with' these stimuli Sarah Wood teases apart, frays, links, shifts and turns the reader - the text opens us up, it dissolves the protective film that congeals between who we are and what we experience. Stephen Benson writes - ' This is a piece that believes in the help literature, art, writing, thinking, comparing and wondering might give us, in all aspects of our lives. And it helps itself to the words images that it needs, that renew it, and renew, too, that of which it sings.

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*Wood, S. (2007) 'Anew Again',  in:
Tiplady, J. & Wood, S. (2007) 'The Blue Guitar'. Artwords: London. pp. 18-36

The objects exist in a MoMart packing case originally used to transport a Francis Bacon painting. The objects and the box were also exhibited at 'Mouseion: artists' reflections on museums' an exhibition by PHD students in the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester

https://mouseionexhibition.wordpress.com/about/mouseion/

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