Rupert Loydell: The Tower of Babel

Mercurius magazine have recently published Rupert Loydell's essay and a selection of painting images from the Tower of Babel project he undertook in 2010-2012. The essay was first published as part of a box containg postcards, a paperback poetry anthology, and this essay in pamphlet form, by Like This Press. A limited edition in a wooden box also included a small original painting. The paintings were shown at Falmouth University and in Truro Cathedral.

The anthology of poems included features work by: Philip Terry, Sheila E Murphy, Andy Brown, rob mclennan, A.C. Evans, H.L. Hix, Angela Topping, Paul Sutton, Peter Dent, Camille Martin, Ian Seed, David H.W. Grubb, Seren Adams, Andrew Moorhead, Jane Routh, John Mingay, Luke Kennard, Steven Waling, Alan Halsey, Peter Gillies, Bill O’Brien, Mike Ferguson, David Hart, Martin Stannard, Rupert M. Loydell, Mark Goodwin, Natasha Loydell, and Ira Lightman.

Loydell is Senior Lecturer in the School of Writing and Journalism at Falmouth University, the editor of Stride magazine, and contributing editor to International Times. He is a widely published poet whose most recent poetry books are Dear Mary (Shearsman, 2017) and A Confusion of Marys (Shearsman, 2020). He has edited anthologies for Salt, Shearsman and KFS, written for academic journals such as Punk & Post-Punk (which he is on the editorial board of), New Writing, Revenant, The Journal of Visual Art Practice, Text, Axon, Musicology Research, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, and contributed to Brian Eno. Oblique Music (Bloomsbury, 2016), Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Music in Twin Peaks: Listen to the Sounds (Routledge, 2021) and Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). His paintings were first shown in Northern Young Contemporaries 1985, and since then he has had solo exhibitions in the UK, USA and Russia, and art in numerous group shows.

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News From Babel - Arcades (Of Glass)

Commerce and climate change

Today's Guardian and Evening Standard both have stories of fascinating sculptural pieces in London.

Barnaby Barford was inspired by the story of the Tower of Babel to create a teetering tower at the V&A formed of 3,000 china replicas of retail outlets from every postcode in London. He says, “I thought how London is like hundreds of different countries and languages all in one city, how this is expressed through our shops, and how I could build a tower that would be both a celebration and critique of commercialism.”

The second is a 'sculpture, entitled The Rising Tide, has been installed near the bankside of Vauxhall bridge and is the work of Jason deCaires Taylor, 41, a British artist best known for creating the world’s first underwater museum in Cancun, then again in the Bahamas.'

'The installation, which sits less than a mile from the Houses of Parliament, comprises four life-size shire horses, standing as a symbol of the origins of industrialisation but also as a warning for the bleak future it is creating for the world by their representation of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

While the bodies of the figures and horses are moulded from real life, each of the horses’ heads has been replaced by the “horse head” of an oilwell pump – a political comment on the impact of fossil fuels on our planet.'

'At high tide, you might barely know they’re there. But as the water level of the Thames comes and goes twice a day with the tide, the four ghostly heads – and the horses they sit atop – slowly emerge fully into view.'

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T. Bone Burnett - Humans From Earth.

Rupert Loydell: The Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel by Rupert Loydell is a limited edition hand-stamped book-in-a-box, including a set of 24 original print postcards, an essay, and an anthology of poems. A deluxe edition in an edition of 25 with original art is also available.

The anthology of poems included features work by: Philip Terry, Sheila E Murphy, Andy Brown, rob mclennan, A.C. Evans, H.L. Hix, Angela Topping, Paul Sutton, Peter Dent, Camille Martin, Ian Seed, David H.W. Grubb, Seren Adams, Andrew Moorhead, Jane Routh, John Mingay, Luke Kennard, Steven Waling, Alan Halsey, Peter Gillies, Bill O’Brien, Mike Ferguson, David Hart, Martin Stannard, Rupert M. Loydell, Mark Goodwin, Natasha Loydell, and Ira Lightman.

Available from January 2013, the individually numbered special edition of 25 wooden boxes including one original painting costs £30 while the limited edition of 500 cardboard boxes costs £15. Enquiries to: nikolai@likethispress.co.uk and orders at: likethispress.co.uk/publications/rupertloydell.

Rupert Loydell is Lecturer in Creative Writing at University College Falmouth. He studied painting and writing at degree level and later specialised in creative writing for his MA. He is particularly interested in process and collaborative writing, and has several books of collaborative poems and poem-sequences in print, as well as volumes of his own solo writing such as An Experiment in Navigation (published by Shearsman). Rupert is the editor of Stride, an online magazine with a worldwide readership, and he also writes book and music reviews for several magazines.

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Mumford and Sons - Babel.