28 August–11 September 2021

Imprints: Art Editing Modernism

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.

Imprints: Art Editing Modernism is part of the Imprints of the New Modernist Editing project,
funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council:
imprintsarteditingmodernism.glasgow.ac.uk
It is led by Professor Bryony Randall, University of Glasgow;
Jane Hyslop, Edinburgh College of Art;
and Edwin Pickstone, Glasgow School of Art

Image: Barbara Balfour, 2020. Photo: Patrick Jameson, 2021