Tom Phillips
Paintings &c
MCMLXV-LXXI

Page [4]

The work in this show covers the years from 1965 to 1971.

Many of the works have to do with words: some are made up only of words and in them the title of the picture is the picture, overalying itself again and again in different letter sizes till only shreds of letters are left exemplifying wordness.

Other words come from the artist's book, a humument which he has been working on for over five years. This is a treated version of A Human Document (1892) by WH Mallock, originally chanced upon in a shop which stands where Blake saw his first angels. The original novel of 367 pages has been taken page by page and has been mined plundered and occasionally raped to produce the material for a new book, which, in that it contains scores, poems, stories, visual matter and language-games, amounts despite its small format to a gesamtkunstwerk. The fragments of illuminated text and occasional quotations appearing in figurative works come from a second copy of the same book.

Many of the paintings contain stripes; some are made up only of stripes. These refer to the colours used in making the painting, in the order of their use ... in the case of paintings which are entirely striped these are the colours used in the studio as a whole in the order of their use. They arise out of a non-wastage principle whereby the artist tries to use all the colour he mixes. At the end of each week the remaining portions of colour are themselves mixed and charted in catalogues of terminal greys. The widths of the stripes are random and obtainined by coin-tossing.

All the figurative material derives from postcards, for they often contain much unineded information about the human condition and incorporate accidental visionary glimpses of the world.

The music scores have all arisen out of specific requests to provide pieces, except for the score of the opera IRMA which is an assemblage of fragmentary hints for sound, decor etc. found on left-over scraps of A Human Document.

a humument: published version
The book is appearing in a number of boxed volumes of loose pages and is produced by the Tetrad Press under the direction of Ian Tyson. The pages are grouped in fascicles according to the method of printing. Thus the first volume contains ten pages silkscreened at Kelpra Studios, while volume 2 will contain twenty pages letterpress and subsequent volumes will use etching, printed collage, lithography etc.

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