Here's a taster of my contribution to the Whipple Museum, Cambridge's, first art book, The Rules of Form: Sonnets & Slide Rules
'It is certainly true that, as the nineteenth century progressed and the British Empire expanded across the globe, a very ugly fascination with power, domination, and force increasingly crept into British culture, culminating in the preoccupation of many fin-de-siécle thinkers with the proto-Fascist philosophies of eugenics and social Darwinism. In this sense, both the poem and the paintings can be seen as expressions of a kind of psychopathology of technical mastery, in which the artist’s mastery of form – superbly evident in all these works – becomes contorted into a fascination with its power to set restraints and limits on other people’s bodies and minds.'
-- From the Whipple Museum Art Book, essay by Dr Joseph Crawford
The book will be published in November 2012 and is available from the Whipple Museum, Cambridge.
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