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Emblem of My Work. Curated by Patrick Wildgust, 169 artists and writers,

Laurence Sterne wrote “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman”. This exhibition celebrated the 250th anniversary of Sterne’s marbled page, number 169 in the book, which Sterne described as “the motley emblem of my work”.

Each participant was sent a blank copy of page 169, consisting of the page number in brackets at the top and a portrait format rectangle below echoing the shape of the page.

The image, page 169, was scanned into a computer, reduced in size and then transferred photographically to a silk screen. This smaller image was then printed into its parent image. This constituted Pete Ellis’s contribution to the exhibition.

This printed image makes reference to Greenberg’s discussion concerning modernism and the essential characteristic of the self-referential: it’s reference to itself as art. Also, the Surrealist notion concerning the distinction between “reality” and representation, considered in Magritte’s painting “The Treachery of Images,[Ceci n’est pas une pipe]” or his “The Human Condition”, an easel painting contradicting and compromising the view from a window. An intriguing aspect of “picturing”, reproducing, copying or referencing something is that we generally use the convention of bracketing. We acknowledge our indebtedness to previous works by naming or quoting them. This piece not only is indebted to Sterne’s page, but to Magritte, or Rauschenberg’s “Erased De Kooning” and others because there is nothing there but reference.

This exhibition included amongst others, John Baldessari, Martin Boyce, Patrick Hughes, Glen Baxter and Les Coleman. The complete list of participants and their resulting images can be viewed at the Laurence Sterne Trust’s home page.