Volume: New Works by Sam Winston

The National Poetry Library houses the Arts Council poetry collection, the most comprehensive and accessible collection of modern poetry in Britain. Its home in the Southbank Centre forms an international art centre and home to one of England’s most celebrated cultural institutions. An exhibition that focused on building bridges between the visual arts and contemporary poetry was instigated by the National Poetry Library.

Elements included typographic installations in the space itself, the presentation of research from a short residency in the form of a new artwork, and the exhibition of a previous re-search outcome called ‘a full folded dictionary’. The new work categorised Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet into three emotional states – passion, neutral and rage, and placed them in large text blocks. From this, a series of collages were also made by cutting each letter out and arranging them as abstracts.

The work asks questions about what resonances printed language can carry – both literally and when reduced to form.

A series of talks were given at the Southbank centre in London, about the ideas the work explores, Articles appeared in publications such as Grafik and Wallpaper discussing the works.

Typographic artist Sam Winston's experimental work blurs the boundaries between words and text. By turning words into images to disassociate their literal meanings and instead expose their artistic potential as purely visual tools, Winston's work challenges traditional ways of how we use language. His limited edition artist books are characterised by this playful approach to language, often fusing elements of children's fairytales and adult books, andfeaturing type, handwritten scribbles and crossed out sentences to form new meanings.

His work has been exhibited at diverse venues, from Colette in Paris to London's ICA, as well as in more traditional establishments such as The Courtauld Institute and The British Library; recent commissions include the Comme des Garcons' guerrilla store in Hong Kong and The New York Times.

His most recent project celebrates the reopening of the Saison Poetry Library on London's Southbank with an exhibition of new works entitled 'Volume'(2007/08) - including a sculpture made from the twenty-volume Complete Oxford English Dictionary; requiring approximately 80,000 folds, 'A Full Folded Dictionary' creates a 'a book within a book', folding each page in on on itself. The exhibition also features a series of images comprising each individual letter from Romeo and Juliet and an interactive project designed by graphic design studio A Practice For Everyday Life.

• http://www.samwinston.com