What R-d Rose: On Ekphrasis

Abstract

What are we doing when we write about images? In a sequence of five texts comprising lyrical and essayistic writing, visual poetry, and text-art, What R-d Rose mulls over this question. The linguistic mode of ekphrasis—describing a visual work in words—serves as theme as well as means, in a series of lyrical and analytical ventures: an ekphrastic search for the picture in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; riddling text-image in the company of Gertrude Stein’s roses; a collaborative exchange on the mythic imagery of Leda and the Swan; ekphrasis as navigation; drawing writing through writing lines. Arguing that text and image cannot be separated, Imri Sandström turns to artist-writers such as Susan Howe and Etel Adnan, the poetics and philosophy of Édouard Glissant, and the postcolonial, queer writings of Sara Ahmed. What R-d Rose is an astute and lyrically charged examination of connections, differences, and indebtedness between the visual and the verbal, and the possibilities of writing the image. What R-d Rose comprises outcomes of the artistic research project Writing Visual Relations: The Possibilities of Transdisciplinary Ekphrasis, conducted by Imri Sandström at HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University, 2022–2024. The project, as well as the publication, is funded by the Swedish Research Council.