Elliptical Reading

Artwokr of a balck outlined hand ona background of brown

Primary Investigator

Abigail Williams (St Peter's College, Faculty of English)

Partner Organisations:

Abigail Reynolds


Elliptical Reading is a collaboration between Abby Williams, researcher in the history of communal reading, and Abigail Reynolds, a contemporary artist with a focus on libraries and book use. It is supported by Wolverhampton Libraries and the British Art Show, which is co-ordinated by Hayward Gallery Touring. The project is focussed on acts of reading together: what it means for an individual to share their chosen book with others in the library; a communal space dedicated to reading. Abby Williams’s recent The Social Life of Books (Yale, 2017) examined the ways in which historical readers connected through the books they read, made, shared. Elliptical Reading will create an artwork that draws on bibliotherapy and the reading group to create a visual and aural polyphony, each reader bringing a radically different text, like different instruments in a sextet. The readers and their texts will be selected to represent the full diversity of the locality, bringing issues of identity and place to the fore. This will be part of Wolverhampton Literary Festival and also British Art Show 9. Elliptical Reading will have visual presence as artwork installed in the library for the duration of the project.


Contact:

Abigail Williams

abigail.williams@ell.ox.ac.uk

Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the

future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.