Justin Coombes

‘Ekphrasis’ is the verbal description of visual works of art, for example, Homer's description of Achilles' shield in 'The Iliad'. This mode of writing appears a great deal in art history and theory, and increasingly, in art itself. The practice component of my PhD consists of artworks that explore the image-text relationship, usually through photography. My thesis, Photography, Memory and Ekphrasis looks at a number of artworks from the 1950s to the present day that also employ the photography-ekphrasis relationship.

I use ekphrasis in my installation, ‘Plea’. Four photographs in light boxes show cormorants roosting in trees on a small island in the middle of a lake. Mysterious, human figures stand on either side of the water. The poem projected onto the gallery wall envoices the male figure: he entreats the other to stop enslaving the birds, and using other forms of sorcery, and engage in a more earthly, everyday form of love with him. Cormorants have been used in Western mythology to symbolise both Christianity - their silhouette is cross-shaped when they spread their wings - and evil: in Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, Satan takes the form of a cormorant before becoming a snake. They could also stand as a metaphor in this piece for the strange slippage created between word and image. The work evokes Jungian individuation and the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind.