"Almost an Island"

Hot on the heels of the Illustration and Digital Arts MA exhibitions is the latest student-curated show, being handled by MA Printmaking. Taking a slightly different stance from the previous shows, the starting point for this exhibition is the poem, The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud, with each participant choosing a different stanza from the poem to use as the basis for their work.

The piece I selected goes as follows:

I should have liked to show to children those dolphins

Of the blue wave, those golden, those singing fishes.

–Foam of flowers rocked my driftings

And at times ineffable winds would lend me wings.

My intial sketches and my main idea focused on the imagery within the poem of dolphins, waves, flowers and wings:

Having worked further from my sketches and developed the final drawings which I hand-coloured using felt tip pens and then scanned and composed the final image in Photoshop, I decided that I wanted to incorporate the text within my final piece. But rather than just adding the text using the computer, I decided to set the type by hand and print it using letterpress, then scan the finished result and add it to my final image (...I am Johannes Gutenberg).