d-r-a-w-n-i-n-w-a-r-d towards the centre of things Nicola Simpson on Dom Sylvester Houédard’s c-dagesh
Simpson, Nicola (2016) d-r-a-w-n-i-n-w-a-r-d towards the centre of things Nicola Simpson on Dom Sylvester Houédard’s c-dagesh. Beshara Magazine.
Abstract
Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924–92) was an extraordinary British monk, scholar, translator and concrete poet who has a reputation and legacy as an artist that still rests on the typestracts he meticulously made on his Olivetti 22 typewriter throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s. The art critic Guy Brett has said of him: …a Benedictine monk who spent most of his working life at Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire [he was] one of the great unsung intellects and playful creative spirits of twentieth-century Britain. Describing himself as a ‘monk-maker’, Houédard was profoundly interested in the experiential non-conceptual truths at the heart of mystical and contemplative traditions, and he found a ready receptivity for his ideas in the vocabulary of the newly emerging conceptual and performative-based art made by a trans-national network of avant-garde artists and poets. As his correspondence, critical writings, and artworks attest, he was always exploring the ‘coexistence’ between his own deepening theological understanding of ‘the wider ecumenicalism’ and the “alive blurring of frontiers between art & art, mind & mind, world & world, mind art & world” of “post-WW/2” avant-garde art. (See Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter, 2012.)
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