Only a year to wait! : The Card - Graham Rawle

If you don't already know this, let me boldly proclaim: I am a huge fan of Graham Rawle's work.

For those of you who don't know, Graham Rawle is a writer and collage artist who made a name for himself with his early work Lost Consonants, a series of visual collages playing around with the meaning of words, which appeared in the Weekend Guardian newspaper for a lengthy period of fifteen years, and later published as a series of books (see some amusing examples here).

His career has moved increasingly into the realm of writing and the literary, with the visual dimension of language and narrative continuing to be a significant part of his work. His two novels, Diary of an Amateur Photographer (1998) and Woman's World (2005), both use collage and are multimodal (I've written a chapter on the latter in my forthcoming monograph).

Rawle's newest novel will be The Card and will be published in April of 2012 (How long am I going to have to wait?!). Since news of this project emerged, there has been lots of speculation about the nature of this book. In particular, that it may be "a piece of writing rather than collage".

On his blog, Rawle has finally put a stop to such speculation, revealing some 'rough page layouts' that show, beyond doubt that the book will be multimodal (though as you can see, it doesn't look like collage).

According to Rawle, The Card, will be about "a man who picks up cards he finds on the street, believing that they hold clues to a secret message". As such, he has also created cards for the purpose of the book, such as the example below (more on his blog):

It's not yet clear whether these cards will be shown in images throughout the book (which I suppose has genre connections to novels such as Italo Calvino's (1967) The Castle of Crossed Destinies) or whether they will be provided as a deck of cards accompanying the book and/or in addition to images of them in the book.

Either way, I am already far too excited. It's going to be a long wait until April 2012!

John Stezaker

I also went to see the three-decade retrospective of another important British artist, John Stezaker, at White Chapel Gallery. I've known this for some time, but now it's definitely official - I love collage! So, as you've probably guessed, Stezaker's work is an art of collage and appropriation, of putting unlikely images together and in doing so creating something new.

Some of my favourite pieces are the ones that seem to create metaphors from the collage assembly. This seems to be the case in both 'Sonata' (2009) and 'Bridge' (2007), for instance, both shown below.

While 'Bridge' is suggestive of the relationship between the depicted father and son, 'Sonata' reflects what we might think of as a dreamscape, perhaps conjured up for the female pianist by the beauty of the music she plays.

I also really loved the 'Mask' and 'Pair' series' which transpose landcapes onto faces in beautiful and haunting ways.

Not only do these collages show up the sophistication of the human perceptual system (in that perceive continuities between the human figures and their facial landscapes), they also show up the way in which we as viewers seek meaning. Somehow and for some reason, these surreal images till conjure an affective response.

One last mention is the (2006) 'Love' images:

The simple act of overlaying the eye area of the same image gives the impression of enhanced attraction, of sensual stimulation.

Ultimately, I can't talk about everything - I would if I could as I was so overwhelmed and excited and intrigued by all the pieces in the exhibition - and I have to say that the images shown here don't do justice to seeing them for real.

The John Stezaker exhibtion is on at White Chapel Gallery until 18th March 2011.