The Practical Visionary is a collaged dialogue between poets and artists Sophie Herxheimer and Chris McCabe, and their luminary inspiration, William Blake.The project, both as book and exhibition, began with Chris and Sophie exchanging imaginary letters between Blake and the Citizens of London, and evolved through photographing timeless and fleeting details on Lambeth streets, to create 21st-century visions parallel to Blake’s mythology. Puddles become a lake where Blake heard the wailing of unborn souls, and the centre of a wheel becomes the eye of Urizen, the personification of reason. These images are spliced together and expanded with glimpses of borrowed words and pages from a giant bible and a tiny nonconformist self-help book salvaged from a skip.In Herxheimer and McCabe’s creative response to the work of this country’s most imaginative artist-poet, The Practical Visionary moves freely between Blake’s world and ours, demonstrating why his voice is a powerful and necessary as ever.