The final outcome.
Detail.
Detail.
Detail.
Clay ziggurat and arena forms.
I was invited by Billie Muraben of Camberwell press to take part in their project ‘Visualising Literature’ as part of the programme Into the fold.
The aim of the project was to highlight the value of visual intelligence in communication. The brief was to choose a page from a piece of fiction and illustrate a passage/sentence/word/mood and set the type on a double a4 spread.
I had just recently finished reading Momus’s Book of Japans, which I thought was an excellent text to use for this project as Momus has an amazing skill of exploring incredible and often wonderfully bizarre ideas in short spaces of writing.
passage from page 83/84
-From the way the idiot Dionysus Ralph tells it, you would think his
voyage a ride to Hesperia in the plush velvet carriages of some starry
railroad, rather than a visit to Japan in a cow. Strange astrological
motifs were visible in a field of stars, he says. From high in the sky
tiny villas with terracotta tiles could be seen, and ancient arenas, and
poplar trees. A plume of steam streaked behind, and the music of the
spheres chimed with the bell voices of a Kurzweil K250.
At last Japan came into view, and then Tokyo, that enormous Labyrinth, its
ziggurat apartment blocks stirring in the blue dawn as it stretched and
rewound the thin, taut thread of quotidian consciousness. -
An interesting part of this project was the workshop that ran as part of it. At Camberwell space, still life compositions were set up with objects that represented parts of each text, and we were invited to come in and draw from these compositions to see how drawing from life affects the final outcomes.
I thought this was a really interesting take on visualising the fictions, to take flat words and begin to sculpt forms from them. From the piece of fiction I chose I made some ziggurat structures of clay to contribute to the proceedings. It is always good to be outside of your comfort zone, and I enjoyed making quick drawings for a change, time constraints meant I chose colours instinctively which ended up informing the end result.
Many thanks to Billie and everyone at Camberwell Press for inviting me to be involved, I look forward to seeing everyone’s final outcomes which will form a publication, more news of that soon.
