The power of words (part II)

"She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams."

- Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree."

- Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense."

- Kate Atkinson (Behind the Scenes at the Museum)

The images here are by Ellen Bell, an artist and writer based in Wales.

"I work directly with books, texts and paper ephemera to create drawings, installations and sculptures that pose questions rather than deliver answers about how we communicate within our familial and intimate relationships," she says. "The physicality of the books, the printed surface of the page and the design of the texts play an important role in the making of my work, as does the serendipity involved in the ‘finding’ of them – the musty smell, the grainy texture of the paper, the inconsistent heaviness of some of the type and the dated graphics of the book covers all play their part in seducing me into working with them."

"Words" by Anne Sexton was published in The Complete Poems, 1981; all rights reserved by the author's estate.