As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

This artwork draws its title and subject matter from American author William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying. Alice Attie made this ink drawing of a coffin by copying lines of Faulkner’s prose in a miniscule script. Depending on the spacing and direction of Attie’s writing, Faulkner’s words lose their legibility and instead take the shape of shadowed volumes, wood-grain textures, and hard, angular contours. The coffin is an object central to Faulkner’s story, and Attie’s mode of drawing with text deepens this connection to her source material. With meandering forms, she seems to meditate on the stream-of-consciousness technique of writing for which Faulkner is well known and, with the relative density of the text on each facet of the coffin, she nods to the novel’s multiple narrators.

Alice Attie

2003

Courtesy of the artist

Ink on paper

22 x 30 inches