Wasted Books
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We do not receive our culture untainted; it comes to us laden with the attitudes, contexts and perspectives of the past and we can be left with the complexity of grappling with work that is beautiful yet damaged. And damaging. TS Eliot’s writing, full of illusions, fragments and multiple voices, is profoundly poetic, but it can also be deeply discomforting.
These 21 book sculptures each taking their form from the different ways that books carry this ambiguity and transform. Some show how earlier readers have left their trace, marking the once pristine book with their ghostly presences. And some push the definition of a book to the limit. Disintegrating to a stage of disrepair, while retaining their essential ‘bookness’. Each book sculpture plays with a fragment from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, the text merging into the form of the book.
These 21 book sculptures each taking their form from the different ways that books carry this ambiguity and transform. Some show how earlier readers have left their trace, marking the once pristine book with their ghostly presences. And some push the definition of a book to the limit. Disintegrating to a stage of disrepair, while retaining their essential ‘bookness’. Each book sculpture plays with a fragment from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, the text merging into the form of the book.
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The artwork is titled by the first four words of the fragment that is written in the particular book sculpture. In the London Library installation, the 21 pieces are scattered throughout this labyrinthine building.
1—3 April is the cruelest month, breeding//Lilacs out the dead land, mixing//Memory and desire, 21—22 …for you know only//A heap of broken images, 30 I will show you fear in a handful of dust. 38—40 …I could not//Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither//Living nor dead, and I knew nothing 63 I had not thought death had undone so many. 110 Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. 173—174 The river’s tent is broken: the last finger of leaf//Clutch and sink into the wet bank. 253—256 When lovely woman stoops to folly and//Paces about her room again, alone,//She smooths her hair with automatic hand,//And puts a record on the gramophone. 296—297 ‘My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart//Under my feet. 297—299 …After the event//He wept. He promised “a new start”.//I made no comment. 301—302 I can connect//Nothing with nothing. 316—317 Picked his bones in whispers.//As he rose and fell//He passed the shape of his age and youth 328—330 He who was living is now dead//We who were living are now dying//With a little patience 331—332 Here is no water but only rock//Rock and no water 340 Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit 360—362 …there are only you and I together//But when I look ahead up the white road//There is always another one walking beside you 390 Dry bones can harm no one. 396—397 …while the black clouds//Gathered far distant, 405—406 By this, and this only, we have existed//Which is not to be found in our obituaries 413—414 We think of the key, each in his prison//Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison 430 These fragments I have shored against my ruins. for enquiries and price list please email jaq.nicholls@gmail.com |
