'I can add colours to the chameleon'
Why. Sculpture. Soften. Shakespeare.
I’m a Creative Director and poet. I’ve spent my life thinking about what writing can do. I work with exciting organisations to invent worlds, campaigns and artistic moments with language at their heart. I release new poetic objects every four months. I was the world’s second most awarded studio in the 2020 D&AD awards. This is a regular letter about my thinking and my work in progress.
We love it, it fills us with longing and heaven and magnificence, but still we think of writing as *small*. It’s a quiet, solitary thing that quiet, solitary people do in attics. It fits into handy octavos, constrained by neat, white margins, that we only really pick up when we have small moments of quiet in our day. It appears on small phone screens and we brush it impatiently up and down. It might seem big on a billboard or be proudly proclaiming purpose in a brand but – I promise you – it was introduced way, way into the process, almost at the end. Almost apologetically, almost as filler, long after the ‘big idea’ has been hatched and all the colours and shapes and pictures have been agreed on.
I say ‘we’, but I mean most people. Because I don’t think any of that and I don’t think you do either. I think writing is *vast*. Infinite. THE big idea. Everything. In fact I think writing is the fundamental basis of reality, the operating system of existence. That’s not a metaphor, it’s actually what I believe, in a really real sense. Most of the philosophers and a lot of the scientists agree with me. (I’ll talk about this in a future letter.)
And because I believe that, I’ve set out to see what writing can do. To see what worlds, campaigns and artistic moments I can invent. To see if I can create things with language that genuinely, positively shape reality.
Creators need patrons. Michelangelo and Raphael, famous Creative Director rivals who ran the hottest studios and competed for the patronage of Princes and Popes, were the W&K and Wolff Olins of their day. You’re commissioned to create something for the glory of an institution and it stands a chance of becoming part of culture. Nothing changes.
So, that’s what this series of letters will be about. The natural philosophy behind why I believe writing is the basis of reality, my ongoing inventions (and failures) in writing, and the practical business of hustling for patrons. I hope you like it. Do write in.
Everything good I’ve ever created has been in partnership with other brilliant minds. I live for conversation and collaboration, so use your words to connect with me. I spend more time on this Instagram than any other social. I share writing inspiration on The Poetry Of It All’s Insta. And I’m happy to connect with people on LinkedIn. If you like this letter then please do share it with others. We’re all aspects of the universe observing itself and so essentially we’re one mind ... but a Fwd: never hurts.
In this letter – what I was doing a year ago, what I’m doing tonight and what I’m trying to do next.
Sculpture
A year ago, November 2019, I put on an installation in Covent Garden. It was called ‘Twenty-five sculptures in five dimensions’. I won a D&AD Yellow Pencil for the writing. (D&AD has been going since the 1960s and is like the Oscars, but for design and advertising. A Yellow Pencil is the award everyone wants to win.)
‘Twenty-five sculptures …’ posited the very Fluxus notion that writing could create a sculpture in your mind. I think you could say *every* type of physical form or temporal experience has now been exhibited as sculpture. From Duchamp’s Readymades to Martin Creed’s lights in a room going on and off.
So seeing as all physical sculptures are only experienced as images in our mind anyway, I thought it would be interesting to skip the making something and just fashion a collection of sculptures from the raw material of a viewers’ imagination.
We hired an empty church and filled it with twenty-five plinths. (The fifth dimension in the title refers to consciousness and so everything in the installation – from heights to the ambient soundtrack to the type sizes – was based on multiples of five.) Each plinth had one sculpture made from a five-syllable title and five five-syllable lines. This text emotionlessly described an object, with lots of wordplay and double meanings to pack as much information in as possible. It was an exercise in tight, controlled, spare writing.
Some examples...
I’ll never leave you
A peony-blue
generic snowflake,
polished tin, the size
of the floor of the
space you are now in.
(I like the illogical references here – peonies are never blue, snowflakes are anything but generic.)
Sylvia and Ted
Jewelled phial. Solution
of suspended sweat.
Lovemaking’s hot stink
forensically
drawn from final sheets.
(‘Hot stink’ is taken from Ted Hughes’ ‘Thought Fox’, itself a poem about the imagination.)
Superposition
Half-metre steel box,
an acid phial brakes
if an atom states.
Panicked scratching and
purring from within.
(Double meanings ‘brakes/breaks’, ‘states’ as in ‘speak’ and ‘condition’ help me expand the poem even though I have so few syllables to play with.)
Earth’s vicissitude
From the ceiling, a
frozen cascade of
carbon dioxide
dyed crystal blue-green.
This room, a geode.
(Ah, I love all the tasty words ending in ‘de’ in this one and how none of them rhyme with the others. The only rhyme being ‘dioxide’ and ‘dyed’ – chiming both aurally and visually.)
The installation was one night only. I’m keen to show it again though, perhaps at design festivals, with twenty-five new sculptures referencing the specific environment or occasion. Let me know your address and, as a thank you for being an early subscriber to this letter, I’ll send you the catalogue from the event which contains all twenty-five pieces.
Soften
2020 has been exhausting and painful for many people. I believe in the power of writing to heal. I particularly believe in the strange magic spells of poetry to heal. So I’m organising and hosting thirty-minute Zoom gatherings every other Thursday, featuring readings from me and guest poets. I’m curating them to lull and unruffle. You can get free tickets for tonight’s show, 7.30pm GMT, here.
Lots of people are fearful of poetry. Not this guy who recently commented on a poem on my Instagram.
He knows.
Shakespeare
I love Shakespeare academia. I can’t get enough of books or podcasts that do deep literary analysis on the life and thinking of a man we barely know anything about. I also LOVE it when computer scientists analyse text for a writer’s linguistic signature.
In 2016 the New Oxford Shakespeare decided to include Christopher Marlowe on the title pages of the three Henry VI plays as co-author. A team of 23 academics, backed up by software, had detected sexy Kit M’s hand in the text. This quote blows my mind:
‘The researchers believe that computerised textual analysis is now so sophisticated that they can even distinguish between Shakespeare writing under Marlowe’s influence and Marlowe writing alone.’
So my idea is to try and get access to this kind of textual analysis programme, feed it my corpus and then attempt to write a collection of poetry that the software *doesn’t* recognise as me. Can I not write like myself? What will happen to my brain if I try to avoid my own voice? What will this process feel like?
More about that in the next letter.
Thank you for reading. Tell me what you think.
Tom Sharp
I love this. Interesting, educational and filling. Can't wait for the next. Thanks.