Rock, Pebble, Quarry: the Sculptural Lives of Stone at Leeds City Art Gallery 2018 Exhibition

In response to Anthony Earnshaw’s mixed media assemblage, the poet Ian Duhig presented this poem:

Raider’s Bread 1979

‘Raider’s Bread’

A lump of moorland flint commanded to become bread by Tony Earnshaw and furnished with knife and board, mounted like a reiver with his wooden buckler and dirk then boxed in a vitrine and quatrains in surreal gongshi.

Stone is the breath God takes between Commandments, skin the spaces monks invented between words in texts, the air interleaving loaves like poems rising from pages. This text will never be the best thing since sliced bread:

better ideas slept in Earnshaw’s last blank paper block he set aside to use his loaf on, napping ready to knap, the wit of that artist they called the Imp of Surrealism, a devil in a desert asking you if you’d like a sandwich.

Ian Duhig