This presentation was originally delivered for the symposium, ‘Writing into Art’, which took place at University of Strathclyde and Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow on 18th and 19th June, 2013. The conference explored different permutations of the relationship between literature and the visual arts. My paper addressed the role of metamorphic language and imagery in ekphrasis focusing on a practice-based approach.
The relationship between literature and the visual arts has a long and complex history which includes poets' responses to iconic works of art such as Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and notable collaborations between artists and poets such as those between Auden and Henry Moore and, more recently, Philip Gross and Simon Denison. Beyond poetry, the tales of Saki and Vernon Lee and the fiction of A. S. Byatt feature descriptions of fictional works of art. The organisers of the symposium emphasised the practice-led response in their call for papers, and for my presentation I read from three of my own pieces of creative writing produced in response to visual artworks: ‘Sentences Not Only Words’, a poem commissioned by Lorna Macintyre for her exhibition of the same name; ‘1-o’ an experimental prose-poem that originally accompanied Cathy Wilkes’s exhibition ‘Moons’ for Switschspace in 2004; and ‘Pearlescence and Patience’ a short story published in the monograph for Zoe Williams’s exhibition at Spike Island, Bristol in 2010. All three of the texts had been publically distributed in a gallery context, but only one (the text for Williams) had been formally published. The texts were chosen as examples of my ongoing investigation of metamorphosis as a linguistic, narrative and imagistic device in ekphrasis. I interspersed the text with quotations from a rage of cultural, aesthetic and literary theorists exploring transformation as a feature of mythology, folklore, linguistic experimentation and visual art. I prefaced my readings with a short introduction in which I outlined the paradoxical relationship of metamorphosis and the supernatural imagination to ‘realism’ especially in the post-digital age where an element of dematerialisation is taken for granted and in art practice where the transformation of materials is both a practical and a transcendent necessity. While undertaking the readings I made use of emotive intonation, vocal projection and selective tempo to heighten the drama of my delivery and evoke a strong aspect of theatrical performance. My presentation consequently held more of a relationship to an aesthetic act than a conventional academic paper.