inspired by ‘A Prospect of Worcester from the East’
Sarah’s response to the painting included creating a modern interpretation of the scene using segments from digital photos of contemporary Worcestershire as photographic tiles laid over the base framework and outline provided by the original painting. The resulting artwork is neither the original painting of Worcester as it was then, nor the Worcestershire landscape as it is now, but a composite abstract created by combining the two. Sarah also produced a hypertext poem and poetryfilm.
Click on different words in blue font in the poem to reveal different photos used to create the photographic tiles in Sarah’s mosaic. Below the poem is an image of the mosaic with gridlines marked on so that you can see where these images were used in the mosaic.
to late summer’s golden harvests,
green fields, city rooves and spires,
the distant curves of the Malvern hills,
mist and cloud combining in a wide blue sky.
I could step through this past prospect
of Worcester into the picture’s pigments,
and piece together each painstaking detail
to get a sense of eighteenth–century life:
how much, yet how little, has changed.
Fast forward with broad brushstrokes
to the rush of cars and people, the flash
of busy scenes caught by the click
of many cameras – shutters opening,
then closing on glass–eye images.
This modern shape-shifting mosaic
is glimpsed in quick snatches – fixed
not with a painter’s palette of oils,
but pinprick pixels of colour. A different
texture, but richly vibrant all the same.
Six hundred thousand residents *
now sculpt this county with their lives
and dreams. Centuries of construction
have re-patterned the cityscape, yet still
the castle, cathedral and backdrop hills.
Still the River Severn, roads and fields
stretch across the contoured miles –
those slopes and dips that Harris
would have known when he painted
‘A Prospect of Worcester from the East’.
