Imprints: Art Editing Modernism explores the impact and meaning of modernist literary works in the present day. This exhibition asks ‘What does it mean to edit a modernist text?’ and examines the creative potential packed into that practice through a series of newly commissioned artworks.

The exhibition is the culmination of Imprints of The New Modernist Editing, a project exploring contemporary understanding and engagement with modernist literature. Artworks featured in the show reflect on questions of intervention, preservation, distance and proximity that are central to the practice of editing an existing text. They respond to issues such as: the particular characteristics of fluidity and uncertainty which permeate modernist aesthetics; the unprecedented way in which writers embraced the process of revision in this period; the effect of the rapid innovation in print technologies during the early twentieth century; the centrality of the relationship between the verbal and visual in the modernist period; and the very wide range of allusion characteristic of many modernist texts. The exhibition includes work in a variety of media, including paintings, drawing, sound works, digital prints, letterpress, silkscreen and engravings, sculpture, collage, and artists’ books, responding to texts from a range of different languages and cultures.

Image 1: Beware of First Hand Ideas. Scott Myles & Edwin Pickstone, 2021. Silkscreen on paper, 70.7x100cm
Photography: Christopher Morrison

Image 2: Monday or Tuesday / an hour in long grass. Anna Chapman Parker, 2021. Ink and gouache on paper, 61x89cm [2] Photography: Christopher Morrison

Image 3: The Book. Chris Kohler, 2021. Collage, A3 [6]
Photography: Christopher Morrison

Image 4: Food Lovers. Carolyn Thompson, 2020. Found book leaves, human hair, 16x11cm [5]
Photography: Christopher Morrison

Image 5: The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs and Experiences No. 2, composed by John Cage, from Between Noise and Sound. Sam Winston, 2019. Giclée print on 188gsm photo paper from graphite on paper, 186x139cm and 186x161cm
Photography: Christopher Morrison

Image 6: Imprints: Art Editing Modernism exhibition, 28 August – 11 September 2021, Shandy Hall, the Laurence Sterne Trust, Coxwold, UK.
Photography: Christopher Morrison

Image 7: Neue Jugend revisited: into the forest with John and into the city with George. Steve Rigley, 2021. Laser engraved acrylic sheet in black valchromat with toughened glass cases, 64x52cm [2]
Photography: Christopher Morrison