Dom Sylvester Houédard: Exhibiting Spiritual ‘architypestractures’ and cosmic dust

Simpson, Nicola (2024) Dom Sylvester Houédard: Exhibiting Spiritual ‘architypestractures’ and cosmic dust. In: Pattern and Chaos in Art, Science and Everyday Life: Critical Intersections and Creative Practice. Intellect, pp. 299-308.

Abstract

This chapter explores the work of Dom Sylvester Houédard (dsh) (1924-1992), a Benedictine monk, artist and poet from Prinknash Abbey, best known for the typestracts and concrete poems he made on his Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s. This essay engages with the exhibition Dom Sylvester Houédard: tantric poetries, which the author curated for the Lisson London Gallery in the spring 2020 and that foreground Houédard’s knowledge and practice of Tantric Buddhist and Hindu spiritual methods. Houédard engaged with the Tantric method practices of mantra, mudra, yantra and mandala to produce a body of work that can be seen as pivotal in the emerging narrative of a transhistorical avant-garde and its engagement with Tantric Hindu and Buddhist practice. The chapter proposes the interdependent relationship between pattern and chaos through a discussion of the presentation of Houédard’s work in this exhibition and the interplay between two separate physical spaces: the geometric patterns of his spiritual architypestractures in one room and the chance, even chaotic representation of the impermanent flux of life in the other room, environmentpoem.

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