Dom Sylvester Houedard was a Benedictine monk and eminent theologian, but also a pioneer, in Britain, of concrete poetry, a poetic form in which the arrangement of words and letters in a pattern on the page relates to the meaning or emotional impact of the poem. Using concrete poetry as a kind of springboard Houedard developed a way of making more purely abstract or pictorial images with the typewriter keys. He wrote that "During 1945 I realised the typewriter's control of verticals and horizontals, balancing its mechanism for release from its own imposed grid, (and) offered possibilities that suggested (I was in India at the time) the grading of Islamic calligraphy from cursive (naskhi) writing through cufic to the abstract formal arabesque, that 'wise modulation between being and not being'”.
This particular image was first conceived as a 'typestract' using the typewriter to create visual patterns on the page, but was later transferred to a more conventional print medium and thus has a different kind of visual impact from the works Houedard made directly as sheets of typed-on paper.