In the final week of the investigate project, I decided to attempt to push the images of the linocut spaces that I had created even further by applying them in prints. First, I decided to slicing up the images of some of the wet linocuts in photoshop to print with the risograph printer. I liked the idea of the binary representation of space with different colors, and I thought it would work well to show the depth and texture of the watercolor-esque lino prints that I had done.

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I think these experiments may not necessarily lead to direct application in the next project, which will explore a refinement of one of the concepts we investigated in Investigate. I have ultimately decided that the riso printer perhaps will be a media by which I create a zine for its depth of texture and cost-effectiveness. However, color is not something that will ultimately come into this next step of the project.

As for laser cutting, I decided that it would be interesting to create an alternative zine by applying the prints to some pages created by two mm acetate so that they could overlay on each other. So, I created a laser cut file for said pages. Additionally, I initially thought that it could be interesting to apply the prints to a puzzle as well which I would lasercut. However, I decided that this idea seemed a bit too hokey with pre-existing autism imagery (which is the puzzle piece).

Once I had the clear acrylic pages that were proportional to my Linocut blocks for the spaces, I decided I would print the pictures onto some of them directly, but I also wanted to put words and fractured pieces of the images using printing on clear vinyl.

On Friday, the 6th of December, we had a really interesting activity/lecture with an artist who worked in memory. In her process, she would look at old family photographs in order to activate her memories and inspire new work central to her family’s history and sense of identity/lack of sense of identity. She was raised in stories about Africa and the Caribbean, but she was born in London. Our initial family stories are brought into our cannon by our parents’ curation. I am also working from family photographs in order to piece together a narrative/identity that I am not entirely sure of, so bringing an awareness of that bias when looking at our personal timelines was incredibly useful.

After the lecture, we brought this lens of analysis to our own practice in the arts. We were asked to bring in three objects that represent our past, present, and future artistic practice.

Past: Painting, an easel. We were tasked to write about this object.

How do you capture a memory? 

The Easel 

It is metal and cold and temperamental. I looks a little like a minimalist robot. 

It should be still, but sometimes in the middle of a stroke, the critical horizontal edge would squeak and dramatically fall, placing the image it cradled in peril.

Sometimes I’d catch the painting. Sometimes it would fall forward on the grey concrete floor and leave a ghost of itself on the wrong surface, ruining its intended surface. 

I loved the room, but hated the easels—the angles and hinges always worked against me. It was the exact opposite of the oil paint, which was warm and liquid and pliable, comfortable on my fingers. I loved the smell of serpentine and how the smell diffused throughout the big angular room. 

Whereas a blot on the easel would always prove peril. Was it a new paint stain or an old one? Wet paint that continued to be dangerous or a mark of a previous mistake. 

I remember setting up the easel when I painted Sawyer. When starting a new painting in the studio, I’d have to drag the easel out of the corner, which was difficult as the heaviness was distributed awkwardly—almost randomly. It was made more difficult by the fact that it was about the same height that I was. Like a thin, cold assistant that would occasionally act up. I was always nervous to interact with the easel.The hinges were pinchers of death, and injuries to  the hand are the worst thing that can happen to a painter, but I was especially nervous then. 

The easel and the masonite surface protected me from him but also to obscure him so I had to peak around it. It was difficult to use it as a recording object 

Present: Linocut–we were tasked to create a timeline to follow an abject related to our current practice.

Future: Book–I brought a book by Tom Gauld to represent the future of my artistic practice, and we were meant to present our relationship to it. I see the future of my practice to continue to explore many different media. Currently, the media that I am exploring is linocut, but I will continue to be narrative driven. Ultimately, I would like to collaborate with writers to build a world to write a story and force myself to write more, but it seems like a larger jump from my current practice.

In order to get excited about realizing some of the images for the children’s book outcome, I knew I wanted to make exciting interiors, so I searched on Pinterest for some ideas for textures and color palettes.

To make one of the key images, a boy looking up at his furniture that has floated to the ceiling, which was in my storyboard, I used a combination of photos and illustration inspiration to render the final result.

I found the final result aesthetically pleasing, but I found myself a bit wrapped up in the physics of the room–whether fabric would have fallen off the bed etc and onto the floor. Also, I considered text going in the bottom right-hand corner, but I didn’t write anything final.

For the second key image that I wanted to complete, wanted to use an entirely different perspective/scale, so I researched birds eye illustrations of houses and modified them to look like my own.

In this image, I now imagine it being a double spread of a full neighborhood on the left side. Text would go on the column on the displayed page to the right. But once more, I am not sure what the exact copy would be.

I thought it was a worthwhile exercise to put the effort into making these spreads in order to test my patience for digital illustration as well as the effectiveness of the metaphor. I think these two images have convinced me that this allegorical interpretation of autism has potential. However, they also gave me a taste of how long it takes to produce them. With breaks, I was able to finish the two illustrations over a period of two days. They were long days, though.

Though I like the concept, I am not sure I could complete an entire Children’s book for the final project. However, I will keep the idea in the arsenal.

In addition to making the illustrations specifically for the children’s book idea, I started working through some rough sketches of illustrations for how I feel about my personal relationship with my brother based on all of the recent reflection that I have done.

These last two sketches, I didn’t fully complete. Too, I am not sure what their function is on their own at the moment. They probably best exist alongside text describing these phenomenon, which I have yet to write.

On Tuesday the 3rd of December, I had another discussion with Mariana in which I discussed the direction of my work. We continued to talk about the spaces that were created by the linocut prints and the possibilities of their perceived scale. What is the difference between experiencing the linocut prints if they are on a wall, where they would feel very small, verses on a page, where they could take up the entire space.

I started to think about what could happen to create spaces/panels when putting the print rooms next to each other. How could they bleed into each other? How could those connections create new spaces.

Too, I started to realize that the works were perhaps becoming less about my own brother and more about the spaces that happen to be of psychological interest. How can spaces/our memory/visual interpretation of spaces reflect our psychology and perception.

Mariana pointed me in the direction of Peter Zumthor’s book ‘Atmospheres’, which addresses the psychology of spaces.

My prints are also bridging the gap between fine art and illustration, but Mariana pointed out that there are many artists who keep both as their practice, namely Paula Rego. She is an interesting artist because the communication of narrative goes both ways: she is inspired by classic folklore, and she also illustrates to accompany stories. He work offers a dark reinterpretation of narrative with a feminist twist, but her stories are largely figure based.

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I like the idea of using classic narrative imagery as a scaffolding for a visual reinterpretation of story to create images that can have lives that stand alone as well as that accompany text.

This has clarified for me the space that I want to occupy with my work going forward. I am happy to let my work sit next to a story, but I also want to leave the spaces that I create up for reinterpretation.

Over the weekend of the end of November, I found myself consumed with making more linocut blocks of my childhood house to tell another component of the story of the psychology of spaces. I liked too thinking about spaces as a fixed lexicon in addition to our verbal means of communication.

Spaces hold memory and psychology, as did the physical process of sitting and carving these spaces into linoleum. Drawing from pictures of my childhood home that I would look at on my computer screen, I used black and red Sharpie to draw linear versions of the rooms on to the block. Then I would carve and print. It is interesting in that in building a positive image, I was essentially destroying a block piece by piece, leaving its shattered contents on the ground. Additionally, I destroyed my original drawing in the process to create this permanent stamp.

Searching for reference photos was quite emotionally intense–in order to find images of the rooms that I wanted to depict, I had to go very far back into the photos app. I am fortunate in that all my family’s photos from our collective iCloud account all synch up. Looking back into these photos is like dipping into a collective memory bank for my family which semi-arbitrarily starts existing with the acquisition of my dad’s first iPhone. The memory broadens from different perspectives as we slowly get more apple devices. My brother even ends up taking several selfies.

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Though I worked from observation, the stamps themselves became rather distorted by my own hand and the layers of memory which make an attempt to stitch them together. As a result, the process of trying to tell the story of my brother is also becoming a story about me. Intuitively this makes sense, but in terms of clinical psychology, it also has roots in the broad autism phenotype, which I mentioned in previous posts.

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I am not the first artist to imbue their psychology into a physical space, as Vincent Van Gogh famously did in his painting of his bedroom in Arles from 1889. However, he uses much more color in order to give the viewer hints into his psychology, whereas mine is much more black and white.

In the end, I also love the surprise of the prints themselves. As with each print and each different paper, the uniform stamp leaves a slightly different trace.

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I think the next step is to try to create narratives with these spaces. I will find my favorites from the huge batch, perfect and imperfect alike. Often, I prefer the prints that are not perfect as they show that even in a fixed idea of a space, there are still flaws.

On Thursday, November 28th, we had a workshop to discuss the upcoming assignment for our essay plan on our practitioner. I am lucky because I was able to contact my practitioner via email, but I am lacking on history of editorial illustration as well as the history of graphic novels/newspaper cartoons, which are the areas that my practitioner works in.

After going through to test our recall, we went through point by point in the prompt in order to catalogue the spaces where we still need additional research as well as by noting our own critical perspective/opinion.

I came away from the workshop with a clearer idea of what I needed to research in order to flesh out my outline as well as an idea for how to structure my essay plan.

After the critique on Tuesday and researching the layout of children’s books on Wednesday, I sat down to try and write a script for the Matthew story as a children’s book, as one of the potential outcomes for the narrative encapsulation of my experience of having a brother with autism. I had a general idea for the story arc based on a central premise.

To further solidify the story, I started writing a script, using very simple story language, while also trying to wrap in pieces from my family’s particular lexicon that has been created from Matthew’s very limited vocabulary. I have been thinking a lot about the way that language is used after reading Natalia Guinzburg’s ‘Family Lexicon‘. Guinzburg’s book is technically a non-fiction memoir about her life, growing up as a member of an influential Italian family in the 1960’s, but it reads like a novel which focuses on the in-group language used to build the family’s dynamic framework. My own family uses coded language based on the few words that Matthew chooses to communicate with us, and so I have worked them into the rough first draft in order to convey some of the rythm of the communciation within my family.

I started writing words a the same time as dreaming up images, so storyboarding and scripting sort of became a simultaneous process, but not all of the images line up with the words I have created thus far:

There once was a boy called Matthew.

Matthew was a little different from his other friends at school.

The other kids liked to play games together during recess and after school, but Matthew preferred to be alone.

The playground was so loud that sometimes it made his head spin, but in his own head, he could control the volume.

At the end of the day, Matthew would dash out of the door as soon as the last school bell rang.

He ran and ran as fast as he could: sprinting past the mean dog, jumping over the plants, and through the squeaky gate.

Phew! He had made it on time.

All of the balloons were still in place, but he decided to tighten the strings just to be sure.

Matthew’s house was special because all of the furniture was made out of balloons! (Might work on restructuring this.)

One day, Matthew stayed late at school, and when he got home, all of the balloons had floated to the ceiling:

The bed, the lamp, the drawers

It took him forever to get them all down again.

He kept it a secret….

The above is all I have so far, but I want there to be some sort of plot twist where one of the balloons will fly out of the house, and Matthew will have to get it back by asking for help.

Too, I want to incorporate the reason for the furniture being made of balloons: Matthew is afraid that another flood will come. Hurricane Katrina destroyed our original house in 2005, and everything was ruined because it sat in water. In this story, Matthew swaps the objects with balloons just in case it happens again. That way if water gets in, all of the furniture can float.

This is a first pass, but it is good to have a rough structure of the story in place. I already find myself questioning my justification/trying to figure out what objects need to be included. The physics of the book is a hang up as well as where exactly it will go. I do know that I would like to highlight the relationship of the other kids and not knowing Matthew’s internal anxieties, as well as the notion that the really important things in his life, the people, won’t float away.

That seems like the logical, albeit corny, conclusion, but it is a working draft.

On Wednesday November 27th, I decided to spend the majority of my day in Waterstones to look at the layout and wording of children’s books to get ideas for how my story could actually look as a children’s book.

Generally I loved it when there would be a change in pacing from the layouts–juxtaposing quieter single page spreads with a lot of breathing space to major double spreads like the one pictured below. (I didn’t like the the change in fonts for this book in spite of the fact that I did like where the text went in relation to the pictures.)

I also really loved when the picture books would have a dramatic shift in scale, such as is pictured below.

In addition to the cinematic paneling displayed in ‘Lights on Cotton Rock’, the panels allowed for a shift in color change and time in a very beautiful way. It is almost the layout equivalent of a dream-sequence, which is immediately accessible without words. This had notable links to the pacing of graphic novels created for adults. I also looked a these, but they tended to have more complex structures.

Maurice Sendak’s ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ seemed to have the most functional structure: it started off with small, confined panels in which the protagonist is in reality, but as the character drifts further into fantasy, the illustrations take up more and more of the page. When we return to reality in the end, the panels once again become confined. it is a beautiful way of confining the story in a very logical manner that compliments the simple story structure.

Overall, I came away excited by the possibilities of creating universes on the page by varying layout and scale, which motivated me to work on creating a script and story structure.

On Tuesday, November 26th, the communications cohort had our mid-project critique with Cato and Ian. After speaking with Mariana the previous day, I decided to dig deep and work to make some more panels in linocut of interior spaces that I associate with my younger brother Matthew, but I also decided to pitch the idea of the other components of the story that I wanted to tell. Generally, there are three outcomes:

1. Linocuts of the space/pieces of Matthew’s rituals: since talking to Mariana, I was able to create two blocks to print of different rooms in the house, and the strongest images are those using black paint.

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2. Children’s book about the extended metaphor

3. General illustrations/writing about self discovery in understanding myself as a sister of a person with autism

In speaking about my plans, I wrote down these notes:

Generally, the notes were that I was speaking a lot about my brother, but there wasn’t evidence of me in the work itself. As a result, it would be important to document that process/incorporate my own voice as recording/writing.

Additionally, for the print outcomes in book/graphic novel form, it would be imperative for me to go and look at the layout of children’s books and graphic novels.

On Monday, November 25th, Mariana Sameiro was a guest tutor for the communications pathway. I had just spent the weekend creating prints of my childhood home to explore the concept of building spaces in panels/to experiment further with lino-cutting techniques.

At the time, I was still debating between styles to explore to shake out some version of the story I am trying to tell of my brother and his particular flavor of autism using a variety of media. Mariana and I discussed the implications of print in narrative–particularly for the application of linocut. I had been experimenting with color in the stamps I had created up to this point, but we both agreed that the images were stronger in black and white. However, as images, perhaps they didn’t say enough. Perhaps it would be beneficial to apply print to the means of adding text to the images. Because the pressure and application of the linocut to paper is so linked to the physicality of autism/anxiety relief, it might be interesting to see if I could use a letter press to apply text underneath the high contrast images.

Mariana pointed me in the direction of some artists who had created graphic works using a similar printing process, namely Giulia Garbin’s ‘The Street of Ink,” which is a publication that strives to tell a non-linear story of Fleet Street, which was an area in London which represents a fallen history of the physicality of printing after the shift to digital print.

The publication itself is a collage of stories of this place with letterpress-printed text an linocut images, so the processes of recording the story are fundamentally linked to its subject matter.

The images and text are stunning, and the graphic contrast created by the linocut images creates a slightly haunting aesthetic for the story of this fading practice of printing. It is almost like a shadow of history, created by anachronistic means. The book’s link to the process is clear and powerful. It also shows the possibility of non-linear storytelling in print and the possibilities of design layout that are possible using linocut. The double spread above shows how Giulia took advantage of the high contrast to accentuate the perspective of looking down on the street, while establishing a slightly dark, whimsical tone based on the imperfections of the lines. The image is clean, yet imperfect, highlighting the bias of the human hand in this type of print media.

In this publication, Giulia plays with different scales in her graphic storytelling. This has inspired me to attempt to create larger, connecting compositions using the linocut stamps in juxtaposition with one another. It has also made me re-think exactly what I think a graphic novel is. To me, this is a graphic publication, but it is not a comic. I like this because there isn’t the visual repetition of a classic graphic novel that, for me, monotonizes some of the images in a story.

To push the idea of playing with scale and surprise, Mariana suggest that I continue working with lino, but maybe I could go even bigger. What if I carved lino floor tiles? What if I projected into space? There are lots of possibilities in the black and white.