Shared Sentence is a sound work composed of prisoners reading aloud a sequence of words gathered over months of shared studio time. Each word was written by someone upon entering the space, marking a moment of arrival. Accumulating slowly, the words document movement into the studio, shifts in feeling, traces of loss, and the absences left by men who were part of the project and then taken away. The sequence slips between sense and incoherence. At times it fragments, at times it becomes uncannily precise. The work holds language as collected residue: partial, communal, and shaped by time and repetition.

Photographs by Tod Jones courtesy of IKON Gallery Birmingham