What R-d Rose: On Ekphrasis

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. Imri Sandström is an artist, writer, researcher, and educator. After having completed an MA in fine art and one in sound art, she was awarded her PhD in literary composition from Gothenburg University in 2019.