National Galleries of Scotland

`The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman? is a comic novel by Laurence Sterne, originally published in nine volumes from 1759-67. Myles was initially drawn to the books due to the inclusion of several unusual marbled pages that Sterne had incorporated alongside entirely black pages and the usual text, testing the limits of traditional printing and typography. Myles?s work at this time had been exploring notions of endings and negation. From this interest evolved the idea to photograph the final full-stop of a first-edition copy of the novel. This was done using a Carl Zeiss photomicroscope, which reveals the full-stop as an abstract shape. The veins of ink leaking into the paper are reminiscent of a Rorschach ink blot.