Ekphrasis in Still Life with Black Birds: Finding a new space - art and prose in collaboration

This paper focuses on a site-specific collaboration between the author and the Cotswold artist, Richard Kenton Webb: Still Life with Black Birds at the Corinium Museum in Cirencester. The collaborative project was formed of a series of black and white linocuts and a short story, both of which were displayed together in the Museum’s dedicated gallery space during September 2014. The paper considers the borderline between collaboration and ekphrasis in terms of the more traditional definition of ekphrasis associated with poetry, which is concerned with the poetic description of a work of art. The paper will consider a new “intermedial” space where the outcome of ekphrasis and collaboration, an exhibition of images and texts as well as a printed book, comes directly out of the dialogic process which precedes it – the “intermedial” space being the dialogue between the two art forms. It will also consider the way ekphrasis arising out of collaboration stimulates consciousness through the way words work in dialogue with the artwork.