Passages

Ink, vellum.

Wren retells the narrative of The Iliad and The Odyssey by transcribing the written poem to create a visual one.  Based on seeing rather than reading, Homer’s iconic texts sprawl in calligraphic script across sixty – three foot wide scrolls that drop to the floor.  The labour is palpable.  Although the work is paper-thin the weight of western history, culture, the load of myth and metaphor, the clout of the written word is invoked in this voluminous writing and the narrative tradition of art. The scrolls are out of sequence and the story is fractured, the original meaning becomes oblique. Where the text overlaps it filters and obscures.  The flow of the narrative is interrupted.  The original text can only be read in fragments; like the archaeologist, the viewer holds shards of the original and can only imagine the whole.  This work slows down the world and reverts to old structures of language and literature to reflect a world of history and allude to a place of myth and metaphor. The work is rooted in art in relation to semiotics, linguistics, visual poetry, and conceptual writing.