Richard Ovenden reflects on the artist Tom Phillips, who died in 2022 leaving behind his house or, as Ovenden calls it, ‘a singular cultural environment, rich in detail, colour and texture’. Much of Phillips’s career was fuelled by a preoccupation with concrete poetry and ornamental forms of writing. In 1966, he set out for Peckham Rye, determined to dedicate himself to making art out of the first second-hand book he could find for threepence. And so began A Humument – a radical treatment of a forgotten Victorian novel, which he collaged, cut up and decorated over the course of half a century.

Photography by Annie Schlechter