Imri Sandström

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. Since the book explores how text and image are interconnected and cannot be separated, the work on typography—that is, the visual expression of the text—became particularly important. The design is based on the idea that text can be treated as a material in its own right. It takes as its starting point the fact that the italics in the original manuscript carry multiple meanings and reformulates them into a system of its own, using different ways to mark emphasis, quotations, and instances where words are discussed precisely as words. Italics are used exclusively for titles of works and books. The conversation between Imri Sandström and Josefine Borgström is set so that their voices meet on the page, with the text margin-aligned to opposite sides of the type area. The book’s soft cover and red edges evoke a notebook. At the same time, the color combination of beige, black, and red alludes to older book editions, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is also discussed in the book. 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.