Song of Myself

Song of Myself, which borrows its title from a poem in Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, is “an attempt to list the various identities that go to make a single artistic life”, in Phillips’s own words. The beginning is based on the confessional Anglo-Saxon poem, The Seafarer, which Phillips first came across as an undergraduate at St Catherine’s College, Oxford (then still St Catherine’s Society) and later, over four decades, translated. The alert reader will find references, direct or cryptic, to literature - Homer, Plato, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Marvell, Conrad, RL Stevenson; to music - Wagner, Robert Schumann; to cinema - Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles. In addition the text is littered with echoes of Phillips’s own artistic preoccupations, as painter, calligrapher, stenciller, maker of books.

Phillips first made a pencil drawing of the text, then worked with the fabricator Leo Veryyt to realise the work in wire, as a hanging poem. Other versions of the text exist, one in a series of paintings called Curriculum Vitae (No XX, 1992), and another in Self Portrait in Silver (2004). Phillips writes: “The unity of the piece in which letters are tortured into cooperation hopes to reflect an overall homogeneity in the spirit of its maker”.