8. The Age of Wire and String:
Initial Images (2007)
Gouache, ink and letterpress on paper
The Age of Wire and String was set as one of the texts for us all to respond to in the first year of my MA. I fell in love with the book the first time that I read it. I also knew that I was the only person who should ever illustrate it and that the illustrations for the book made by everyone else in the class were wrong. I have never felt this certain of anything before or since.
These color images were my initial responses to the book and my final pieces for the class. The pages were planned and printed first in letterpress and then painted and drawn into. The miss placed letters were carefully planned. I wanted the effect to be of an instruction manual created by someone working with compromised equipment and only a vague recollection of what one might have looked like. I was beggining to think about how different paper stocks might correspond to tonal shifts in the writing but I’m not sure that I managed to achieve this.
It has often been important to me that my work appears amateurish as I feel that this allows inlets that are not possible with more polished illustration. I went on collecting, collaging and drawing images for The Age of Wire and String for several years after I graduated from the RCA. I would lie awake at night worrying that someone else would get the opportunity of illustrating it.