Sam Winston’s practice is concerned with language as both a carrier of messages and a visual form in its own right. His recent work has focused on exploring the creative potential of darkness, including a month spent living and working in the dark. Building on that experience, Winston commissioned four artists to undertake their own darkness residences, from which they generated drawings, writings and films. A Delicate Sight documents these outcomes, alongside Winston’s own darkness drawings, to explore the promise of the imagination.
The book begins as a sequence of pages shifting from solid black through to white, at which point the reader encounters texts by the contributing writers – Raymond Antrobus, Bernardine Evaristo, Don Paterson and Max Porter – and drawings created by Winston during his month-long darkness residency. Thereafter, the pages of the book begin their gradient sequence in reverse, returning from white through to the darkness of the black page. The title of the book is printed on the reverse of its paper jacket, so it is partially obscured.
The book will be launched at an event at the Barbican, in which the public will be invited to explore absence and creative practice through their own darkness residency within an immersive installation. Participants will be given unfolded jackets from the book to draw upon, which afterwards will be re-wrapped around the book and taken home.
