Iona Lee

Throughout the MFA I have enjoyed developing a poetic style of essay writing, utilising the playfulness of thought and of language that poetry affords to creatively explore philosophical concepts. More recently, I have added an element of typesetting and design to this, allowing the writing's visual aesthetic to contribute to its message.

'Sibyl' is the result of this experimentation - a collection of works which explore philosophical, poetic and artistic resonances implicit in the myth of the Sibyl of Cumae. Most famously appearing in the Aeneid, the Sibyl was a prophetess and guide to the underworld. She inhabited an echoing, one-hundred mouthed cave; she burned books of prophecies; she wrote her fates on oak leaves, to be scattered by the wind; and over many centuries she declined, eventually becoming nothing more than a disembodied voice in a bottle.

I am using this narrative as a lens through which to concentrate my academic and poetic research: themes surrounding memory, magic, temporality, tale-telling, the ephemeral and the digital. Exhibited is a collection of writings, some of which flirt sculpturally with their own content, becoming a meta-reflection on the medium of writing itself. I am inspired by the drift of wisdom, the storage of data, and inexorable decay. How reality becomes myth, myth becomes symbol, and symbol, in turn, becomes reality.