Sam Winston is a striking example of how a weakness can become a strength. The artist discovered his unique and exhilarating approach to the written word through his experiences with dyslexia. In the struggle to master text, Winston’s highly visual mind was drawn to the ‘fascinating world of type, colour, paper, line and form’ behind the written word: ‘I began to use typography when I started to write. This may sound rather obvious but I found writing incredibly difficult and its format certainly restrictive. What then started was a fascination with language and a desire to use letterform to explore it.’ These early enquiries reaped an astounding reward in Winston’s particular hybrid of wordplay, fine art and graphic design.
The artist’s highly personal take on the written word has won him global acclaim – his word/art pieces have found homes in special collections at MoMA, The Getty Research Institute, the British Library and the Tate galleries. I first encountered his work by chance in the Saison Poetry Library, stumbling upon the recent exhibition Volume housed in the library foyer. Expecting to pick up a nicely bound Seamus Heaney collection or a Beat poet anthology, I was stopped in my tracks by Winston’s A Full Folded Dictionary. In this work the twenty-one books of the Oxford English Dictionary are presented with their innards on display, transformed from everyday household items into bizarre sculptural landscapes. Divorced from their familiar representation, we are unable to dismiss them as ‘reference books’. The viewer is inspired to re-think their fluid, proteate content - the fact that the sum of our language can be found on their thin, black and white pages. I never got past the library foyer that day. The prospect of leafing through Seamus Heaney seemed unbearably dry in comparison with Winston’s re-animation of the word, discovering text within its visual and sensual possibilities.
The work Silent | Listen appears as exemplary of Winston’s craft. The two antagonists – ‘Silent’ marked out in white, ‘Listen’ in red – leer at each other across the black page, drawing our attention to their paradoxical status as anagrams. Winston twins the words while opposing them, a process of mirroring and counteraction that leads the viewer to reflect on both. While enthralled by Silent | Listen it struck me that Winston’s oeuvre functions in a comparable manner. Through marrying text with visual art, his pieces allow word and form to speak to each other, pulling the audience in different directions– do we ‘view’ Winston’s art or ‘read’ it? Partaking of Winston’s work was never going to be simple. As the artist tells us, ‘My pieces are a compromise between my vision of the written word and how it is understood in the conventional sense.’
Winston’s nonconformist style enables a rare crossover from the art scene into the commercial world. He has collaborated with rock-giants Muse on their third album, worked with Japanese fashion gurus Comme des Garcons and most recently, in April 2007, embarked on a Live Draw project for outdoor gear specialists The North Face. For Winston, commercial work entails ‘applying his voice’ not bowing to the big man’s edicts. ‘You can’t hire a dog and then start barking’, he laughs. At The North Face collaboration it was certainly Winston that was making the noise. Taking the company’s strap line ‘Never Stop Exploring’ as inspiration, Winston opened the Harajuku Tokyo branch of The North Face stores to a host of revellers, with guests drinking free refreshments and working on three metre-long artworks. Elaborate and multi-hued line drawings spiralled and blossomed from Winston’s starting point, the words ‘A line that unites and divides’ worded half in English, half in Japanese. All remains is the accompanying solo piece. Winston’s idea of a ‘harmony between message and medium’ is discovered here through the painting of text as a cloud formation around Japan’s Mt Tatayama.
As Winston points out, there are different kinds of ‘literacy’. He reminds us that written communication has a richly visual history, restricted in our modern era by standardised print. In his role as lecturer at several art colleges, Winston noted the vast proportion of students diagnosed with some kind of reading or writing ‘problem’. Such artists, he believes, simply need more flexibility – a recognition of their different ways of seeing. Winston’s choice to pursue his own ‘problematic’ relationship with the written word has lead to an astoundingly varied and successful career. Who else but Winston could go from selling wind-resistant fleeces to exhibiting cut ups of Romeo and Juliet at the Saison Poetry Library? If dyslexia was ever a ‘weakness’ for Winston, it is now most certainly his strength.
Sam Winston will be exhibiting as part of You – Silently, a group show exploring the relationship between Image, Object and Text. The show is curated by Marina Warner and runs 17 January–14 February at the University Gallery, University of Essex, Colchester.
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