The idea of excision, cutting away, and the haunting beauty of the spaces that remain is an ongoing theme in Jane Benson’s (Thornbury, England, 1973)
work. In Song for Sebald, the artist explores separation and belonging through the writer W.G. Sebald's novel, The Rings of Saturn. Benson transforms the physical text of the novel using a simple knife. By cutting out every part of the text except the syllables of the musical scale - do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti - she uncovers the "potential music" of Sebald's prose: a set of notes hovering inside the novel, divorced from the original text. From that point of excision, Benson finds the novel's “potential music” through a process that links author, artist, composer, and performer. Each of the novel's ten chapters produces a movement created collaboratively by composer Matthew Schickele; in each, the music is guided by the spaces between the excavated syllables Benson has cut, and its emotive lyric is suggested by Sebald's original prose. Benson's multi-stage process creates gaps and absences in order to stitch them together over time and across media, in a process of collaboration that links together nationalities, disciplines, genders, and fields of creative work.