Wayne Burrows writes in Backlit Gallery meets Nottingham Writers’ Studio: When writing and visual arts meet, magic can happen
Nottinghamcityofliterature.com, 9 April 2018

Backlit Gallery and Nottingham Writers’ Studio recently joined forces to organise An Introduction to Art-Writing, a series of workshops led by Wayne Burrows aiming to bring together all those in Nottingham with an interest in the connections and overlaps between writing and visual art in the city. Art-writing is probably most familiar in the form of exhibition reviews and essays on particular artists’ work, and while we are certainly covering that in our workshops, there are plenty of other possibilities and approaches worth exploring.

A good example of a work in which art criticism becomes art in its own right, Queer Paper Gardens, or The Wildlife of Symbols – a collaboration between the Portuguese artists paula roush & Maria Lusitano – explores the history of collage through the work of its female practitioners, from Mary Delany’s scientifically precise cut-paper botanical illustrations of the 1700s to Valentine Penrose’s surrealist Dons De Femininesmade in 1951. The beautifully produced five volume publication borrows its format from a 1934 edition of Max Ernst’s collage novel Une Semaine De Bonte, but uses the artists’ own collaborative photography, collage and drawing to highlight a less familiar path through the history and meaning of the medium itself