Cantos-Open Horizons 2024 is part two of a text-based artwork which uses visual art notebooks collected between 2014 and 2024 as found text, reframed and rewritten in the style of The Cantos of Ezra Pound as an epic, non-rhyming, stream-of-consciousness, prose poem, where unmediated inner thought processes are exposed as a kind of self-portrait, exploring ideas about the act of creating, aesthetics, art, painting, expression, being, politics and representation through times of inspiration self-doubt and trauma. Cantos-Open Horizons traces ideas through the development of the Horizons project. The notebooks were started as a dialogue with poet Derek Mahon and continued after he died in 2020. This work was conceived as a visual, written document comprising short paragraphs, sentences, lists and quotes. The idea for this work came about after reading Uncreative Writing by Kenneth Goldsmith, who introduced me to The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Derek’s copy of Joseph Joubert has kept me company, and Lydia Davis’s Essays have constantly inspired me throughout the process. It is 22,280 words (126 pages).

Also see Artwork Horizons 2014-24 and Solipsism Series 2013-15