Eleven artists and illustrators were asked to contribute a letter of the alphabet each to an artwork celebrating Dr. Phil Shaw – spelling out his name – every work was to be within a 10 cm sq area. To decide who was going to do which letter, we pulled them out of a hat, it happened that I got the dot, the spot, the full-stop / period. I stared at the piece of paper that I’d unfolded, slightly mystified for a moment, thinking someone had forgotten to write on this one. Ahh…, okay! Once I twigged, the next question was, how do we make this work? Luckily, there’s the world of conceptual art, which is a craft, as Socrates said (long before Plato invented his cave) the craft of powerful thinking. Well, I’m not much of a one for chess, or art-world mischief, it took me two or three weeks to come up with the idea to burn a hole in the piece of paper using the sun at the summer solstice shining through the occulus of the Pantheon in Rome focused through the old magnifying glass I keep in my studio.
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