Texting Images: Ekphrastic Texts

Texting Images is a partnered Blindside x Emerging Writers' Festival program that commissions original works of ekphrastic writing. For 2025, four writers were invited to produce a work of ekphrasis in response to artworks exhibited at local artist-run initiatives. Under the guidance of poet and critic Lucy Van, they were encouraged to think about the paradoxical nature of representation – the ‘energy of arrest’ central to the creative act – that comes to bear on the task of rendering visual works into text. Responding to artworks displayed within the vast, and fast, artist-run scene, these writers stage their encounters with an isolated moment in recent exhibition history.