Born: Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1965

Brighid Lowe came upon the idea of using book titles to create a text when she saw two titles whose chance juxtaposition seemed to make sense. She created I Saw Two Englands Breakaway over a period of eighteen months, collecting books in charity shops, car-boot sales and second-hand bookshops. She chose books primarily for their covers, then assembled 225 of them into a grid, so that their titles, if read by the viewer from left to right, would construct a continuous text.

'My work is not concerned with beginnings or endings but the space between,' says Lowe, and she places the viewer in that middle ground, between the single text and the landscape of books. The text produced by the book titles is at times surreal, yet has something of the force of a manifesto or political declaration.

More work by the artist is available at http://www.e-2.org/c-ship/index.html.