Poetry & Portraiture

18.00, Thursday 29 April 2010
Old Anatomy Theatre, King's Building, Strand Campus


Michael Landy
Stephen Romer
 
Discussions are free and open to the public but booking is essential.
Please contact Susie Christensen to book.

This discussion will bring together a poet and a visual artist to explore the role of the self in art, thinking in particular about the artists’ representation of their fathers in their work. In his 2004 Semi-detached, Michael Landy installed a replica of his father’s suburban Victorian house within the confines of Tate Britain. Visitors could make their way around the house (where his father still lived), serenaded by a recording of Landy’s father whistling his favourite tunes. Later in the year, Landy combined drawings, videos and photographs in an exhibition about his father called Welcome to My World. Stephen Romer’s latest collection of poetry, The Yellow Studio, shortlisted for the 2008 T.S. Eliot Prize, contains a series of poems written to the poet’s father, shortly after his death. Romer describes these as ‘less a reckoning than an attempt to speak’. Landy and Romer will come together to discuss the impetus behind these highly personal portraits of their fathers and, more generally, to explore the autobiographical element in their art.