A short one this week!
Here we move onto phase 2: Define, Test and Prepare. What do I have to do in this phase?
These past couple of weeks feel very excuse-heavy, and I haven’t been concentrating much on the course. This is mostly due to stress and anxiety due to Covid-19 announcements and being unsure how life is going to change under them. In Week 6, I have a week off in Walthamstow that I will be using to focus on Stowe Framework and build towards the assessments above.
What is meant by vernacular typography exactly? The concept of the vernacular within graphic design came about in the 1970s to 1980s as a reaction to the rule-based schools of modernism. Designers took inspiration from outside of the design world, and vernacular came to mean “natural, unschooled sensibility free from the stylistic self-censorship of modernism” (Lupton, 1993). Equally, Poyner states that “vernacular design’s appeal lay in its authenticity, the sense that it was a natural, unfiltered expression of the way people felt, of their local concerns, untainted by strategy, marketing imperatives and the slickness and calculation typical of the design’s elite professional class” (Poynor, 2013). Both Lupton and Poynor recognise that work termed vernacular took an instinctual route with design, free from the calculation and underlying marketing strategy. The recognition of vernacular resonates with the aims of Stowe Framework, because the project aims to reflect what is here in the community.
A champion of vernacular design in the 1980s, Tibor Kalman and his New York design company M&Co viewed vernacular design as “just there, part of the landscape, a form of visual slang” and that it was “a source of clean, honest inspiration” (Poynor, 2013; Lupton, 1992). While Kalman accurately recognised that most people pay no attention to their design environment, his view was naive to the politics between the dominant culture and subcultures by which he was inspired. Vernacular, and drawing inspiration from it, has its problems. By designating a design or piece of typography as vernacular, it creates an ‘othering’ of the said piece and a division that suggests some design work is more laudable because of its origins. Lupton describes “the term ‘vernacular’ is also relative: it places a standard language against a lesser dialect, a dominant culture against a secondary subculture” (Lupton, 1992). In this project, ‘othering’ could take the form of comparing branding of multinational companies, for example, Nando’s, Sainsbury’s, HSBC, against small businesses with signs designed by the community. In Walthamstow, it is the multinationals that stand out and seem ‘other’. While Stowe Framework concentrates on what I see as the vernacular, it includes visual references to large scale because to the people of Walthamstow, these pieces of lettering are as much part of the environment as a local butcher’s prices on a chalkboard.
The research underpinning tries to embody Kalman’s technique of seeing what is truly there and often overlooked, while respecting the context by reporting and analysing. As Keedy describes: “What is needed is an awareness of what crossing cultural/historical boundaries actually means, as well as an understanding of the importance of context” (Keedy, 1998). Stowe Framework focuses on typography rather than overall vernacular design, but the same design criticism applies to typography as a subset of designed work.
Through the examples given in the lecture, I’ve looked at some different kinds of collaborations and have drawn out three common lines a project can follow. Read more about them here. Here are some other collaborations…
For me, the Meg and Mog series of children’s book by Nicoll and Pieńkowski is exemplary and historically significant collaboration in my life. The illustrations and colours are simple, bright and punchy with funny stories involving Meg the witch and her cat, Mog.
Nicoll and Pieńkowski met when they worked at the BBC together on a children’s art show, Watch!, where he was commissioned to provide live drawings. They developed a technique where the images appeared on screen as if my magic, but were a trick of the light, and they learnt how to create a narrative through illustration. When Nicoll left the BBC in 1971, she suggested that they created a children’s book series.
As a condition of being illustrator, Pieńkowski insisted that the spells that the witch cast could never work, and this rule creates the madness and mayhem around which a narrative can be woven. After showing their first book to the editor Judith Elliott at Heinemann, she commissioned more and they have been loved since then.
Their collaboration was a distant one: geographically apart in Wiltshire and South West London, but in pre-internet times meant that they have to be inventive in how they worked together. Pieńkowski wrote that they …
“… had to develop a way of working together. We hit on the idea of meeting at the Membury service station on the M4. This became our routine. We were regulars, the friendly staff didn’t seem to mind and I always brought a little bunch of flowers to put on our table. We spent many frenzied hours struggling with stories and pictures, accompanied by any number of cups of tea.” (Pieńkowski, 2012)
They identified that space away from their everyday lives, with Nicoll saying that “one of the biggest difficulties … is getting rid of the rest of your life, if you’re going to do it together … Because we do it in this curious way, where we battle over every page” (Rabinovitch, 2004). What is more away from everyday life than a service station, a transitory place only visited in places.
Working together out of the studios, they developed a new process “on a big white pad. Nicoll would dictate some words, they would both scribble. Loosely, she writes the stories, he does the pictures, and the spells they make up together.” As the stories are short at 32 pages long, there is little space for a complex story. “The way we work is, we do the beginning, then we talk about the middle, but then do the end. So if there’s a squash it will be in the middle – but we must have an elegant beginning and end” (Rabinovitch, 2004).
Collaborating in this way obviously worked. Between them, created 23 books in the series, many of which are still in print and have spawned theatre productions and audiobooks. Since Nicoll’s death in 2012, Pieńkowski has continued to produce a few Meg and Mog books with his partner, David Walser. The collaboration was strong, though not without its difficulties, as parties have remarked!
Pieńkowski: “Each time we start on a new book it becomes a struggle and a battle – the course of collaboration never did run smooth – but somehow in the end our Muse has not deserted us in our hour of need – so far!” (An Interview with Jan Pieńkowski | Playing by the book, 2020)
Walser says of Pieńkowski: “We have been together for 56 years but he isn’t at all easy to work with. [He] works much better on his own,” he added. (Flood and Lee, 2019)
Pieńkowski of Nicoll: “Helen was an inspiring but merciless collaborator and usually managed to get her way with her innate charm.” (Pieńkowski, 2012)
Perhaps the separation allowed the collaboration to flourish, as they definitely seemed to work better on their own day-to-day.
The stories were drawn from Polish witch tales told to Pieńkowski by his next-door neighbour in childhood, and the colours draw both from Polish traditional folk colours and the bright pop-art of the time.
The books have earned Nicoll and Pieńkowski many awards across the book industry, but more importantly, they have been treasured by generations of children in Britain and they continue strong in print and memory.
Pieńkowski, J., 2012. Helen Nicoll Obituary. [online] Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/09/helen-nicoll> [Accessed 2 July 2020].
Playingbythebook.net. 2020. An Interview With Jan Pieńkowski | Playing By The Book. [online] Available at: <http://www.playingbythebook.net/2010/10/25/an-interview-with-jan-pienkowski/> [Accessed 2 July 2020].
Flood, A. and Lee, S., 2019. Jan Pieńkowski: Inside The Mind Behind Meg And Mog – Picture Essay. [online] Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/09/jan-pienkowski-meg-and-mog-booktrust-award-picture-essay> [Accessed 2 July 2020].
Rabinovitch, D., 2004. Authors Of The Month: Helen Nicholl And Jan Pienkowski. [online] Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jan/28/booksforchildrenandteenagers.dinarabinovitch> [Accessed 2 July 2020].
A learned, and/or implicit, trust that the people involved have the successful completion of the project as their focus
Sometimes a project needs greater numbers of people to weigh in to make sure that it is well received, at the same time too many people can cloud the water. I don’t think there is a hard and fast rule of numbers, just experience and numbers!
How the collaborators communicate and how openly they do so can make a break a project
Does everyone understand where the other collaborators are coming from, and who the project is really for? Will it work for the intended audience? Are the collaborators the best place to fulfil these roles?
Afterwards, Alex challenged me to put them in order. Here is my response:
By the end of this week you should be able to:
It was nice to revisit the Migrant Journal by Christoph Miller of Offshore: the glistening metallic inks and the swooping arrow that forms the G. This is what I would term more of a traditional collaboration, and I’ll explain what I mean by an untraditional one further down!
Usually, in publishing or any project, the content is followed by the design in the schedule, the what comes before the how. Migrant Journal messes with this timeline and the content, the words, are conceived simultaneously with the design. I would anticipate that in a publication so rich and full of infographics that its both a necessity and product of editorial/design collaboration. It helps, I think, that each issue has one theme tying it together to give razor sharp focus to the contributors.
The team behind Migrant Journal worked remotely in different countries none of them held passports for, and before C-19 struck. This only emphasises that collaboration is possible to matter what obstacles are in our way.
In a similar vein, Danielle Pender and Shaz Madani of Riposte magazine are a collaboration of designer and editorial, how and what. Print seems to be the chosen medium of collaborations of this type – it forces the creator to produce work in a slower way.
Anna Lomax and Jess Bonham are collaborations, but they do not differ in disciplines, rather fundamental approaches to graphic design. Their yin and yang of maximalism and minimalism, high culture and everyday life seems to balance out well, tempered by years of working next to each other at art school. I’m inclined to wonder at the chances that brought the right two people together that could work together with opposites without it imploding! Solid.
Liv Siddal for the Rough Trade magazine, collaborates with one main designer, Bruce Usher, but to keep up with the hectic publishing schedule has regular contributors. This collaboration works on trust, in that she has to trust that her contributors will supply suitable material each month, for example the bands with disposable cameras on tour. I like this form of collaboration because it has a solid base with her and her designer, and has a structure of contributors yet still has freedom.
Now onto the non-traditional types! The previous examples are where collaboration occurs before the point of official publication, The next practitioners, on the other hand, have collaborated differently.
Morag Myerscough creates her concepts with a partner, Luke Morgan, but her most consistent collaborators are her audience. Whilst she was designing the dining rooms in the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, she and the poet Lemn Sissay created visual workshops. The children could participate in the workshops and from there she created a typeface to display their poems and their favourite word DAZZLE. Although the bright colours match her signature, the content was drawn from the children so that they could see themselves reflected in the space they were staying in.
In another hospital setting, she presented her bold designs to the nurses of the children’s ward that were met with initial reticence. When she sent up models of how the rooms would look, the nurses showed their patients who reacted positively and from that she gained their trust. She took their idea of a blue room for some patients, and with their support the project was a mistake. She continues to collaborate with them by listening to feedback and suggestions from the patients and their families.
In the project Club Under My House, Myerscough collaborated with the community and South London Gallery to create a space in which children from the building above could come together to make art. From workshops where children and teenagers drew patterns that were featured on the walls, she learnt that they wanted a space they could dance, sing and perform. Hence, the name of the project.
I could go on about Myerscough amazing projects, however I think that key to her work is her engagement with the communities she creates in and her listening to people informs her work so that it becomes their work too.
Hato and Kellenberger White also have fascinating projects… I haven’t forgotten them but they have sparked ideas that I will go on to reference in later weeks…
A learned, and/or implicit, trust that the people involved have the successful completion of the project as their focus
Sometimes a project needs greater numbers of people to weigh in to make sure that it is well received, at the same time too many people can cloud the water. I don’t think there is a hard and fast rule of numbers, just experience and numbers!
How the collaborators communicate and how openly they do so can make a break a project
Does everyone understand where the other collaborators are coming from, and who the project is really for? Will it work for the intended audience? Are the collaborators the best place to fulfil these roles?
Research into the genre of graphic designers who write, from the following options: A news story; a children’s story; a launch document for a new brand; a love letter; a business plan; a diary; a manifesto; a speech.
I work in children’s publishing, and I’ve steered away from projects on the industry before in the course so I can expand my experiences outside of it. This week though seems a good week to get stuck in. So here is subject: children’s story.
To start with I went to my local Waterstones to get some inspiration. To tell whether a book was illustrated and designed by the same person, I checked the imprint page that the illustrations and words were wholly attributable to one person alone. Usually, books are illustrated by one person and written by another, sometimes these collaborations coming together organically, or the publisher pairing two compatible people together.
From classics to modern books, a number of books have been illustrated and written by lots of people. BUT is illustration and design the same thing? Where do the lines blur? For example, the book Malamander was written and beautifully illustrated by Thomas Taylor, but Ben Norland designed the cover and I designed the insides of the book (typesetting). Is it the same? Not really.
So I googled “Designers Who Wrote Children’s Books: and came up with these examples:
Sparkle and Spin by the Rands is described as “With its bold, playful interplay of words and pictures, the book encourages an understanding of the relationship between language and image, shape and sound, thought and expression, a lens we’ve also seen when Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco introduced young readers to semiotics in the same period.” (Brain Pickings)
Analyse digital and print production techniques used by designers to tell a story.
There’s a lot of discussion about how this brief could be interpreted, and in 400-words, I can only focus on one of them. The topics include:
I could write it addressed to a child, starting it off as: “Reading is important. Sometimes, authors write short sentences. [parts of the sentence are highlighted and marked] The structure and meaning is clear for readers, like you and me. Authors do write really long sentences with lots punctuation; for example, like this sentence will be when I come up with enough words (and most sentences like this are needlessly complicated)”
or
“We are all creative. Some of us write words into stories, some us paint and draw colours and shapes into art, some of us play and sing musical notes, some of us build tall, tall towers. Some of us are creative with numbers, some of us bake and cook delicious food.
“We are all creative in our own mixed-up, higgedly-piggedly way. How are you creative?
“Some people write and draw stories…”
I work at Walker Books and so have (and have had in previous roles) the privilege to work alongside many talented authors and illustrators, including: Shaun Tan, Chris Riddell, Jack Noel, Daisy Hirst, Lucy Cousins, Gary Northfield, Tom McCaughlin and Oliver Jeffers. Most of these would describe themselves as illustrators rather than designers, and in publishing this does play a crucial role.
Some illustrators, like Chris Riddell (Goth Girl), come from a political cartoon background; Simone Lia (They Didn’t Us THIS is Worm School!) is a cartoonist for the Observer; and Gary Northfield started out writing comics. Their work can often come in the form of comic strip-styles
Gary Northfield writes an entertaining series about Julius Zebra, a zebra going through different historical periods (such as Romans, Egyptians), following the primary school curriculum. The text comes in short, digestible chunks often in the form of speech bubbles or asides. For children, this makes it manageable as they learn to read, and introduced them to speech patterns like a surprise (exclamation marks) and streams of consciousness (ellipses).
It might be thought that designers/illustrators think in different ways, one in words and one in pictures. Gary Northfield said in an interview about his creative process:
How do you conceptualize/construct a piece? Do you think of it as a story, snapshot, or abstraction?
Always as a story. I love comic strips and the art of comic strips and my brain is hard-wired to see the world in comic strip form.
– Gary Northfield, in interview with Tiny Pencil
Here’s what ties designers/illustrators and authors: both disciplines tell stories through their work. It is natural to create stories and characters visually and come up with the words that they speak and situations they are in to form the character, and hey presto! There’s a book. (Not quite…)
Salisbury and Styles point out that the unique developmental capacities of children shape the stylistic suitability of visual texts, presenting their own set of paradoxes and challenges:
“Many publishers and commentators express views about the suitability or otherwise of artworks for children, yet there is no definitive research that can tell us what kind of imagery is most appealing or communicative to the young eye. The perceived wisdom is that bright, primary colors are most effective for the very young. The difficulty is that children of traditional picturebook age tend not to have the language skills to express in words what they are receiving from an image. They can also be suggestible and prone to saying what they imagine adults want to hear. So, even with the best designed research projects, the world that children are experiencing will inevitably remain something of a mystery to us.”
Writing and illustrating means that you can include text into the drawings as your idea is conceived. In the image below, the Zebra work as cheers from the audience and as a reader you can hear the crowd chanting it. It awakens the imagination to other senses, too.
Characters are vital in children’s books, and to take one of the original illustrator/authors is Beatrix Potter who drew her characters before writing the stories to go alongside them. My favourite has always been The Tailor of Gloucester.
Peter Rabbit was written in a letter to entertain her friend’s young son, Noel Moore, who was sick at the time of the letter. Potter went on to publish the tale and as you can see from the V&A Archive, she designed the layout as well as writing the story and illustrating.
Although the combination of images and words for millennia in storytelling culture, children’s publishing is relatively recent. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, developments in the printing process (lithographic printing and half-tones) meant that it was a viable possibility.
Babar, Curious George start to excite children, and the roles of designer and artist and illustrator and author blurred. Saul Bass, creator of film opening credits as we know them, wrote and illustrated Henri’s Walk to Paris. The title text makes the legs of Henri on the cover that also work for other languages:
Colour, shape, text
Type treatment
Interaction between text and illustration is essential. I would like to carry this through into the production and produce a riso-printed booklet to introduce my article. Riso inks can be overlaid to create new hues that symbolise the blending of different disciplines, and also come in bright colours that appeal to children. The build-up of ink can be inventively used, like this:
My instinct is to use colours like CMYK as that is what I am familiar working with! Children’s books will often use spot colours like Pantones, neons, or Pantones to really punch an impression and get a child’s attention. The contrast between colours is vital to a child’s visual development.
Saul Bass also used colours that are reminiscent of riso printing:
It’s more appropriate to share this work as a print project, as the majority of illustrator/authors work with books aimed at younger children. Currently, there is less demand for digital versions of children’s books as eBooks than for YA content. While children are a huge consumer of digital content, it is more likely to be in the form of apps and videos.
Deliver a 400-word article, exploring one of the preselected themes, that is presented as a typeset In-Design document, or similar.
Books are never created by one person alone. A beautiful spectrum of roles and processes combines skills to form them, from a spark between neurons through years of crafting to a place on our bookshelves. A missing step in the publishing journey leaves the idea unloved by all who could.
Stories are an art form; books are a product. Shaping words into dark woods, scary monsters, unrequited lovers, to narrate between people, is not only as old as humanity but a part of what we consider to be human. It is how we understand ourselves, our societies and the world around us.
Books are a new player in the stories game: after the proliferation of the printing press in the fifteenth century, books for children were not conceived until the nineteenth century. Many (not one) factors like lithographic printing and the adoption of half-tone dots from intaglio photography, allowed this to happen. Halftone dots create the optical illusion of a riot of colour as words fashion worlds in our mind.
Children’s books needed one more ingredient: the value of the childhood experience as we know it. Stories had begun to be written especially for children, and not as an adaption of adult tales, prior to the 1870 Education Act which allowed children to stay in education and placed value in them. With a new market of literate readers, and means to produce books for them, children’s books exploded as a genre.
Sometimes author and designer are distinct, sometimes the roles blend into one. Their stories are told through the shape of objects, of words and bring to life all the senses. Saul Bass and Paul Rand are well-remembered designers of the 1950s for jumping into children’s books, playing with how the physicality of books gives presence and how letters are meaning-infused shapes with which to be teased.
The article below explores how the publishing industry approaches children’s books, how illustrators and designers see their role within writing stories and why some creators choose to self-publish. In-depth case studies take us into different graphic schools and explain why, no matter the influence of style, the child reader should be at the centre of the creators’ process.
Deliver a sketch to outline how you will use digital or print production techniques to elevate the content of your article.
I’m not sure if this is work of a mad person, or the beginning thoughts of my project…
With the words written (see above), I have created a storyboard for the first two paragraphs:
I like Futura as a font for the sans serif version of a typeface suitable for children. To customise it a little, I have put the characters through Calligraphr to create my own version. I have amended the majuscule I to give it horizontal bars, minuscule j and l to give them kicks so that they are not easily confusible with any other glyph:
One page to illustrate my words…
Collaborate through group discussions on the Ideas Wall.
This looks like a great second part of the module and I can’t wait to get stuck in!
Research the requirements of each of the four preselected project briefs. Post initial thoughts onto the Ideas Wall and elaborate with sketches and notes to rationalise your project selection. Add these to your blog.
Consult experts in your life (from the video by Stuart Tolley)
The project I have chosen to work on is … Research and Development with the Science Museum. As Stuart suggested, I talked to Ben Norland, Executive Art Director, and Maria Soler Canton, my manager, to get their opinions on each of the projects. I always had an instinctive pull towards the Science Museum brief, but I wanted to get unbiased feedback and so although I told Ben and Maria that I had a preference, I didn’t tell them which one I was leaning towards. Luckily, we had similar thoughts on and they identified the Science Museum as one they thought would suit my skills, and the one they would likely choose themselves! Had they had different opinions, I would have listened and considered, as I really respect their views and their measure of me over the time I have been working for them.
I’ve tried to go outside the industry of museums and look at how other projects have presented large amounts of information, because I feel a cross-disciplinary approach will be the key to an innovative project.
“A major exhibition that dramatises and codifies Japanese clothing brand UNIQLO’s LifeWear concept… the large-scale immersive, experiential event showcases UNIQLO’s popular LifeWear concept from three perspectives: Art, Science and Craftsmanship”
A museum? No. A novel way of displaying a collection? Yes. The show is broken down into three sections to show the collection in different lights, art science and craftsmanship. It displayed at Somerset House, a venue that hosts art and fashion displays as well as commercial ventures (such as the Fortnum Christmas Arcade). The exhibition takes the visitor through different immersive experience from a six-metre long area hung with the brand’s AIRism fabric to demonstrate its lightness, an interactive 3D exploration of HEATTECH and was riot of colourful technology. It also had an area dedicated to Uniqlo’s sustainability programmes such as their Jeans Innovation Centre.
For the cynical, it’s a marketing event for Uniqlo’s products: they will hope for increased social engagement and increased sales. However, to me, it’s a way to really demonstrate the core values of the brand in a non-sales environment and to bridge the gap between everyday apparel and art.
Closer to home for me, artists Lucy Harrison and Katherine Green started an archiving project centring around “Warner” properties built in the Waltham Forest area of East London from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. The Warner properties are a longstanding project of terraced, self-contained flats that allowed people in social housing to live in safe, clean and dignified settings. Many are preserved and are sought after properties in the area.
The project started in collaboration with the Walthamstow Historical Society and sought to capture the previously unrecorded social history and aimed to “document the current residents of ex Warner properties, including long-term renters, new renters, those who recently purchased or who had purchased directly from the Warners.” With further sponsorship from the Arts Council England and local companies, they called out for further contributions and built an app through which participants can explore oral histories and guided walks around the area.
The free app Navigating Nightingale was created by Archives, AIM25 and the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing to provide an augmented-reality walking tour of central London, following in the footsteps of the pioneering nurse, Florence Nightingale. The app includes innovative features including a cartoon that ‘comes to life’ and sophisticated map overlays. It is accessible, as it is free, and draws on the archive of historical photos, illustrations and stories to bring Nightingale, the archive and the history of the city at the time and allows people to physically explore the area rather than visit the museum.
Its drawbacks could be considered that it is available on iOS but not Android, so it can only be used by users of that operating system, though it could be expanded. The app also focusses on Florence Nightingale, which is its strength and its weakness, that it would only appeal to a small number of users. Overall, I think this is a great use of archival material to bring to life a central character in British history outside of the museum.
Making Historical Collections Accessible. (2019). 1st ed. [ebook] London: Wiley Digital Archives, pp.1-12. Available at: http://images.news.wiley.com/Web/WileyEnterprise/%7B06852548-647f-4642-9e4c-bf20ca43290c%7D_W269M_Wiley_Digital_Archives_Ebook_030718.pdf [Accessed 26 Oct. 2019].
In our seminar this week, Laura Gill came on to talk more about her work. She seems to have many hats on! Her Keep It Complex, Make it Clear project is a grassroots poster campaign that allows people to engage with politics without it being overwhelming. I like that the name suggests that we should stay away from soundbites and keep focussed on the complexity of politics, whilst making it easier for people to understand.
The main thing that resonated with me the most is how she creates design frameworks that others can come in and add their own experiences, for example migrants, and have the living design framework celebrate concepts such as human movement rather than stigmatising migration.
This week I didn’t engage as thoroughly with the materials as I could have done, and this is the cause and effect of struggling with the challenge this week. I read and watched the materials, however I didn’t make notes, which for me is key in my understanding and retention. So hands up, I could have done much better this week.
This week you will:
I went down a rabbit hole this week: from the lecture and resources and after talking to Joe I felt confident that I would be able to produce a good piece of work. Then I started researching and overthinking. This is an editorialised, similar to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, portrayal of my thought and design process.
Joe shared with me Francis Alys’ work Green Line where he carried a bucket of green paint with a hole in (Dear Liza…) along the armistice line between Jordan and Israel. He was “greeted by onlookers with some bewilderment” (1), which makes me smile. I wonder how many people pointed out the dribble before Alys explained.
A process that leaves a mark on the earth without explanation when you first encounter it appeals to me; but I can’t justify pouring paint on a London pavement for environmental/fly-tipping/angry councils at me. Alys also says that he “wanted to ask what the role of poetic acts could be in highly charged political situations while acknowledging that the relation of poetics to politics is always contingent” (1) and this is inspiring to me because I’ve always shied away from what I feel are difficult subjects.
Similar to Alys’ artwork, Garrett Car walked along the border of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic after the Brexit vote to demonstrate the permeability of the border: in some cases, fields straddle the border, or it is marked by hedgerows (2). But the customs check border that politicians are arguing about? It doesn’t exist either physically or people’s minds, as residents of both RoI and NI cross the border for employment, business, education and healthcare. It made me consider what invisible borders are present around me that I could tread and document, which can also link back to Iain Sinclair’s Walking the Ginger Line (3), although his work differs because it explores the temporal differences between places now connected by the Ginger Line.
My history doing BA English means that I have a fair grounding in philosophical and literary critical thinking, so I dug around my memory for a different theory. Hegel’s spiral of dialectical theory interests me, but I struggled on how I would demonstrate this as a black line drawing in a novel way without copying existing visual models. I also went back to Plato and Aristotle and mimēsis (4): in a world where images are so copied and digitally replicated, is the original perfect form lost? In which frame would I place it?
The work of Alfred North Whitehead fascinate me and I found a wealth of criticism on his models and processes in the online Falmouth library (5). He approached processes from the mathematical point of view and applied it to creativity. But I couldn’t quite grasp the process well enough to feel confident to commit it to a black line drawing as per the brief.
I feel like the double-diamond model of thinking suits how I have trained myself to think through the years, in a more concrete format. Ideas, or a problem, appear to me as instinct as a singularity, and then I collect research, push at the boundaries, before distilling to a more refined idea incorporating different branches into one, idea that is tested in development before it is presented as a final project. The growth of the idea is rarely as neat as the two diverging lines, and the path I take in the diamonds is more a squiggle than a linear path. But when do paths have to be straight?
And so the overthinking continued until Stuart said that what I most definitely what was doing. I went back to the brief and tossed out lots of ideas. Lots of ideas that I couldn’t quite grasp? Out. Running a route? Love it, but I’ve done it before and want to test myself like Alice did last week.
The brief did say that black line, and I take this is a hard and fast rule that my project has to address. What is a line? In a mathematical sense, it is the realisation from a one-dimensional singularity into a two-dimensional plane between two points. It is straight in this context, but contour lines on a map define the height at a certain point on a bumpy plane.
In art, you can use lines to define an edge and to add value to a surface to create the illusion of three dimensions. For example, in wood and metal engraving most commonly used in the
A line can separate, a line can guide. It can be arbitrary: to provide meaning and context whilst not necessarily dividing. Or, it can be divisive, by separating thoughts, people, countries, views.
A line can be something to follow until it divides into multiple paths, or smudges into streaks.
In this blog post, I consider what could constitute a black line, other than a black line on paper. The double diamond shape reminds me of a prism refracting its component colours; the original light is as close to white as you can manage and displays a rainbow. A parallel process is seen in chromatography, where you can split out the colours of ink using water:
The water acts as a medium, carrying the different pigments in an ink different distances according to the weight of the colour molecule. Since all black ink we make can only ever be an approximation of true black, splitting the ink into its different colours would create a random, prismatic effect.
This was my first attempt (not scientific) using newspaper (apparently a great type of paper for chromatography). I did leave it longer, but it didn’t work, and by that point, all the shops are closed.
New experiment now going ahead with a sharpie and coffee filter. Correction, apparently it can’t be a sharpie as they are permanent. D’oh.
Above is my submission for today’s brief – the chromatography coffee filter I made yesterday has been quartered and arranged to resemble the double diamond design process. The original point has organically grown/exploded into something of itself, and shown fascinating colours, before clashing and reducing down to the final delivery. The shapes remind me of the anaphase change of cell division: the duplicated DNA separates into the two cells before a new cell wall is built between them.
Our process is just as fundamental to us as DNA is to life.
I also played around with layering the different stages of the chromatography:
and just letting ink dissipate on a soaked coffee filter:
Both form very natural images of a cross-section of a tree, and a gas cloud in the universe.
“What also fascinates Amanda about these projects is the way things are able to move and grow and then disappear. We learn that this fascination is tied to her identity as a, likely illegal, refugee from Texas. Beyond her art providing a way for her to feel both visible and invisible, I think there is also a connection to migrant and refugee bodies. Migration is often a risky and dangerous process in which people die. Bodies are found on the border, in bodies of water, and perhaps there is something comforting about returning to the earth and to the world through vulturizing. I hope we can share our thoughts on what Atwood is trying to say either about Amanda or about nature/civilization, ecofeminism, migration, or beyond through these art pieces.”
Amanda Payne’s Vulture Sculptures: Art as Social Commentary by Linda Luu
Anna Robinette 