[no title: p. 271] 1970

Curator: This is a page from Tom Phillips's *A Humument*, an altered book work created by painting, collaging, and cutting up an obscure Victorian novel. Editor: It’s whimsical! The overlaid words and meandering lines create a playful tension with what seems to be a serene landscape in pale blues and oranges. Curator: Phillips began this project in the late 1960s, seeing the source text as a kind of found object to be transformed through artistic intervention. Editor: The composition feels very deliberate. Note how the artist guides your eye with those looping lines, almost like a treasure map of language itself. Curator: Absolutely. The book, and each page, becomes a site for exploring themes of memory, history, and the subjective nature of reading. He is intervening into an existing narrative, and creates a new one. Editor: It’s fascinating how these fragments of text, divorced from their original context, gain a new resonance within the visual field. Curator: It truly underscores how meaning is constructed, negotiated, and always contingent. Editor: After looking at it again, I am struck at how such a small work packs such a punch.