City of London Festival: Was It For This The Clay Grew Tall?

Textual artist Stephen Raw’s distinctive approach to ‘language-made-visible’ has been stimulated by the WWI poetry of Wilfred Owen and the Requiem Mass, both set to music by Benjamin Britten in his choral masterpiece, the War Requiem. Raw’s artwork explores Britten’s choice of juxtaposing Owen’s 20th century poetry with the centuries-old Latin words from the Missa pro Defunctus: pity and anger encountering reverential and commemorative language.

Supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust