Anne Vibeke Mou, A Window for Shandy Hall

A Window for Shandy Hall, the Yorkshire home of 18th century novelist Laurence Sterne, where he wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Among several graphic elements in this novel, Sterne inserted a marbled page into the body of the text to express the vital element of chance in his work. Anne Vibeke used the ancient Japanese art of Suminagashi or ‘ink floating’ to guide her engravings on the dining room window, at the heart of Shandy Hall.

Anne Vibeke Mou has used the process, the art, the craft of marbling as the starting point for a new work for the panelled room in Shandy Hall. She has gone to the ancient art of Suminagashi marbling, which can be traced back to 12th century Japan.

Suminagashi can be translated as ‘ink floating’ and is perhaps the most subtle form of marbling. Delicate swirls of pattern are created by blowing or fanning the ink on the surface of the water and are then ‘fixed’ onto equally delicate Japanese paper. The cloudlike patterns are suggestive and meditative. Mou created sixteen pieces of suminagashi paper and used them as templates to guide her meticulous engraving of the patterns onto glass using a diamond point.

“The landscape, the movement of the sun, the time of year, the time of day and the position of the viewer invite a continually shifting perspective as the patterns embedded in the window emerge and recede from one moment to the next.”

Commissioned by The Laurence Sterne Trust with support from Arts&Heritage. With thanks to Barley Studio.

The publication A Window for Shandy Hall was produced in an edition of 300, with an essay by Patrick Wildgust, Curator, The Laurence Sterne Trust at Shandy Hall.

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