Reading as Art
curated by Simon Morris
Bury Art Museum
26th August - 19th November 2016
"One body of works in the exhibition involves monumental accumulations of appropriated texts, dismantled and remade. Carol Sommer has painstakingly located all the sentences within Iris Murdoch's entire oeuvre of 26 published novels that describe the states of mind of her fictional female characters. Collated in strict alphabetical order and run on continuously like an extremely long prose poem, these myriad sentences form a substantial paperback book. If a page is read at random in an orthodox way, the effect is mystifyingly cogent and certainly poetic. Sommer's book is accompanied by an exploded installation version comprising hundreds of single book pages pinned to the gallery wall, each blank apart from a single sentence printed in its original place on the page." From a review by David Briers, Art Monthly, October 2016
"Treating book pages like panels, Sommer has reprinted each quotation on a paper and in a font that match her own editions of Murdoch's source books, but erased all the other text. The extracted sheets form a constellation of quotations pinned to the wall, which hone in on expressions of female experience and lots of mentions of virtue without privileging or cohering any particular position (in the sense of either voice and opinion), as if pulling against the clear moralism that Murdoch's philosophy is so often criticised for being." From Nick Thurston's essay Readography, in the Reading as Art catalogue, edited by Simon Morris
"As a delicate landscape of paper, Sommer's work is a quietly powerful study of human experience, cascading across the room, and provides a real spectacle, a highlight of the exhibition." From a review by Edwina McEachran, betweenland.wordpress.com, September 2016
"Treating book pages like panels, Sommer has reprinted each quotation on a paper and in a font that match her own editions of Murdoch's source books, but erased all the other text. The extracted sheets form a constellation of quotations pinned to the wall, which hone in on expressions of female experience and lots of mentions of virtue without privileging or cohering any particular position (in the sense of either voice and opinion), as if pulling against the clear moralism that Murdoch's philosophy is so often criticised for being." From Nick Thurston's essay Readography, in the Reading as Art catalogue, edited by Simon Morris
"As a delicate landscape of paper, Sommer's work is a quietly powerful study of human experience, cascading across the room, and provides a real spectacle, a highlight of the exhibition." From a review by Edwina McEachran, betweenland.wordpress.com, September 2016