Alight on all things precious

Alight on all things precious weaves together Sarah Rice’s ekphrastic poetry and luminous colour reproductions of both her own and others’ artwork. Poem and artwork are seen in light of each other.

The collection contains her recent work and examples from earlier projects, commissions, and collaborations with artists working across the fields of painting, glass, ceramics, metal, photography, and print. It invokes the pleasures and precariousness of the creative process, both visual and literary, the work of tending and attending, and touches on how matters move us – materially. How we both shape and are shaped by the things we touch, and that touch us. Alight on all things precious stirs up dust, shadows, ghosts, the missing, or merely hidden, and sets them dancing.

As alert to the textures of making as it is sensitive to the nuances of human connection and loss, Sarah Rice’s work thinks with its fingertips, using its intelligence to register what, like dust, might scarcely seem substantial. With her, the term ekphrasis outgrows the bounds of writing-about-pictures, into a truly multidisciplinary creativity that lives in the weave of things, the freedom of the space between.
Philip Gross, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize

Available as Digital book (downloadable PDF) or Softcover book