The Uncommon Reader

The Uncommon Reader is an exhibition that explores the wide-ranging literary associations in the work of Tom Phillips. Featured here are his illustrations to Plato’s Symposium, Ulysses and to his own translation of Dante’s Inferno. Also included in the exhibition are portraits of writers such as Samuel Beckett, David Rudkin and Salman Rushdie, a book jacket design for Iris Murdoch and a fragment of The Library at Elsinore installation. Tom Phillips is well known for works that combine text with image. In this exhibition we see some recent sculptures in wire made from pure lettering that quote from Henry James and from Wittgenstein's Tractacus. Also on display will be a selection from the artist’s enormous photographic postcard archive project, We Are The People, on the theme of readers
The exhibition will be open to the public from 24 October to 15 November 2009 at the Garden Gallery of The Oxfordshire Museum as part of the Art in Woodstock festival.