Episode 4 - A Chocolate in the Archive: Tom Philips’s A Humument with Dr Chloe Pinto and Isabel Snowdon

Kemp, Sam, Pinto, Chloe and Isabel, Snowdon (2024) Episode 4 - A Chocolate in the Archive: Tom Philips’s A Humument with Dr Chloe Pinto and Isabel Snowdon. [Video]

Abstract

Today we talk about playfulness, beauty and ribbons of text. Dr Chloe Yale Pinto gives us her insight into working with Tom Phillip’s archive, and Isabel Snowdon, a creative writing graduate and editor of The Waterfront talks collaboration between past and present, reader and writer. Tom Phillips’ A Humument is a famous artistic ‘treatment’ of the W.H. Mallocks 1892 novel The Human Document. Phillips' appropriation or misappropriate of the original text consists of a beautiful and colourful painting and sketching over of the original page, obscuring all but a handful of text and rearranging the words into a poetic new narrative. The resulting plot, strung over the 367 pages of Mallock’s original text, follows a Bill Todge and his romantic endeavors and encounters, often cast adrift, literally and figuratively, in a textual landscape which is both contemporary and Victorian. It’s a text of revision, re-working and hi-jacking, both speaking to, from, and against, the original source. A Humument was first published in book form in 1973 and has gone through numerous wildly varied editions and was a life-long project for its artist creator. You can find out more about the text, and buy copies at Tom Phillips’ official website.

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