Sphere Of Influence

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James Joyce (circa 1922)

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Night sometimes brings to life an unusual plant whose gleam Decomposes furnished rooms into clumps of shadow. Its gold leaf, held by a very black pedicel, stands unmoved in the Hollow of a slender alabaster column.

Francis Ponge ‘The Candle’

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Philip Larkin in the 1950s (unattributed photograph)

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Even today, Imagination is considered to be the ability to form images. But it is rather the ability to deform images presented by perception, the ability to liberate us from basic images, the ability in particular to change images. If there is no changing of images, no unexpected merging of images, there is no imagination and the act of imagining does not occur. As Blake proclaims, 'The Imagination is not a State, it is Human Existence itself.

Gaston Bachelard from Air and Dreams

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Chris Petit film still from Content

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This was a personal journey into my cellar rooms of forgotten memories. The camera was quiet irritated, because there was not sufficient light available. Time stands still. The camera-shutter was open. Waiting for something, waiting for thoughts, waiting for a little truth. Embracing the shadow of fear.

Klaus Elle on his photographic series Illuminations

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Hauntology (a pun on ontology) signifies the study of both being and (liminal, residual, virtual) non-being. The past might be a foreign country but it is constantly making incursions into, and bargains with, the present (and the future).

Christopher Pankhurst

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A bridge between imagination and reality must be built.

Patrick Keiller from his film Robinson in Space (1997)

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Oliver Pike White Owl (1922)

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Tacita Dean Untitled (2011)

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Tacita Dean detail from Fatigues (D) (2002)

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Emma Johnson ‘Orford Ness, Suffolk’

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Legible Landscape

The term “legible landscape” – Leesbaar Landschap – was coined in 1998 by the Dutch poet and novelist Willem van Toorn to describe the way the land reminds us “along complicated and sometimes unconscious lines” of a past with which it is important to stay in touch simply because “we owe our existence, our vision of the world to it”.

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Always between his eyes and objects stood his impenetrable glasses, cautious, abstracted, scrutinising and eclectic – an impersonal stronghold of glass, both barrier and look-out tower – two water-filled moats around his secret, his demanding gaze, or rather two trays of a balance that stands – how strange – not vertically but horizontally.

Yannis Ritsos from ‘Twelve Poems About Cavafy’ (1963)

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Anne Ferran, 30 from the series 1-38 (2003)

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Thomas Hardy, who might be called 'an incubus of the forlorn' after one of his own characters, and for whom the past is an obscure and heavy presence that folds each person into a path determined by probabilities and failures, suffered from his memories.

Fanny Howe The Wedding Dress: Meditations of Words and Life

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No it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence - that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream, alone.

Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness