William Morris

As part of the 2019 Bloomsbury Festival, writers were each given a famous Bloomsbury resident to write about, the only restriction being that it must be 260 words long. Tom Sharp was given William Morris, and repeated a 26-word mini-bio of Morris ten times in the manner of block wallpaper printing. The text forms rivers between the words to create negative space tendrils, the commas mimicking rose thorns. You can read the text from left to right, or in the smaller blocks. Sharp wanted the act of reading to mirror the point of the piece – that we can ignore meaning in favour of the decorative.