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Tiercel 01 'The power of character', Cover design and colophon

Cover design for the original version of Tiercel. (Click on the images to embiggen). It uses a bit of patterning from a Saxon artefact alongside textures and patterns built up in drawings and on the computer. The image was printed out large, so that I could use it as a doubled-over wrap, to create a softback cover.

I'm also including the colophon below, which gives my source for the book.

Ever since I worked on this book, I've been aware of the power of character to help us to inhabit a topic differently. While I haven't always explicitly used narrative characters in my artists' books, even those that simply posit a different point of view end up inhabiting 'another self' -  even if at its most basic that self is the 'drawing self' as opposed to the 'printmaking self'. Though I have always found that books gave me a chance to assemble events and outlooks more 'in the round' that expressing myself through single images. I think it is the sense of cntext books can provide; sometimes this ends up, as here, being worked out into a narrative situation, but elsewhere it seems that there is an opportunity simply to present, as ironic or as pastiche or as investigation, or as satire or as reliquary. All these notions encapsulate a  point of view, and books make this process, for me at any rate, a very easy and attractive proposition.

If you are impatient to see the rest of Tiercel, you can view it straightaway, here.

Radio 48

In this, the final page, I reach out towards the air and grasp it.

Am I reaching for the voice, for the implied contact of the communication? Am I touching, holding the messenger and connecting with its message? Or am I crushing it? Is the annihilation of the message/lacewing the completion of its journey?

This plays out some of the same tensions we saw in the transmission of the message 'swallowed by birds', or the notion of the message/lacewing annihilated by (head)light (which might itself be the form the message takes).

But its the end of the book, and you'll henceforth have to find your own bugs to crush.

I will return shortly with a serialised version of Tiercel, my book about a hunting falcon who watches a battle between danes and Anglo Saxons. I wrote a poetic text that is based on a fragment from a well know Anglo-Saxon piece 'The Battle of Maldon', but I retell it from the bird's point of view.

Thanks for reading along, and don't forget that if you are interested in having a nice, high-resolution copy of Radio for yourself, you can get one (among several others) at my Blurb pages.

Radio 47

I really did hear a show about lacewings which crystallised a lot of other material for me and helped me begin this book. I have no idea whether any of the 'journeying' significance I've ascribed to them has any basis in fact, but it was convenient to look at them that way. I think that their winged stage is basically a breeding vector though, so there's that.

They make a comeback here, identified with the wandering line of data that comes in and touches my radio, inspiring this book and, perhaps, completing their journey.

Radio 46

Approaching the lit window.

I based this on my window when I was living at Upton Road in Bristol, and a radio that I subsequently gave away to someone who needed one. (it's represented by that dim shape to the bottom right of the window frame). I never could get the bugger reliably tuned in, so I hope they had better luck than I.

Radio 45

Back in the initial scale/scenario, moving towards the lighted window at night where the listener is waiting for the message that proves he is not alone.

I'm not sure about the text at this point. It seems to me that the collapse back into a more mundane scale has brough with it an over reliance on the available 'Radio' references. I'm not sure now how I would connote a real listening experience. Certainly the sense of company-desite-loneliness can be a real experience of radio, but I'm not sure that, given the foregoing metaphysical shenanigans, that I would choose to frame it quite as 'loneliness' where I doing this book today.

Radio 44

We're switching back to our intitial scale at the beginning of the book, with the stream of information being seemingly drawn out of the night towards the listener.

I now cringe at the pun here 'the light programme' - but you know what I meant.

Radio 43

At this level, there's enough quiet for the information to once again be perceptible...

Radio 42

Continuing on from the zoom into the 'iris' sequence, the spaces between elements starts to open up, and the space is not so densely packed with information. We're now at the level of the space between things, or as my chums in Ozric Tentacles like to put it 'The bits between the bits'.

Radio 41

The extreme 'close up' effect over the preceding pages has brought us up to the level where the indentity of the image breaks down, and there are only materials to see reather than shapes. 'Weaving through the waves of the electromagnetic stream' seemed like an apt description of the listener's search for meaning over the airwaves, or anyone's struggle to make sense of the visible world.

Radio 40

Part of a sequence of images beginning with Radio 38. There is a small, barely-noticable bit of filigree decoration off centre at left that connotes a kind of embroidered 'weaving' of the needle. Im not sure it really adds anything and I think I'd just remove it were I producing the book now.