Para-illustration Gaps, fragments and spaces of the literary imagination
Foul Matter explores the gaps and spaces between reading and seeing, and the literary and visual, to propose the notion of para-illustration, a creative intervention that expands the materiality of a writer’s notes, drafts and archives to develop new methods for making literary images. The (para-) material of a writer’s notes, deletions and writerly traces exist beyond known, finished and published texts. So, what happens if we use earlier, fragmented versions as a source and what does this allow for? What if we look at word changes or erasures, or notes on the back of a shopping list?
How might we read and account for these material ‘incidentals’ in the image-making process? Foul Matter is that process. By connecting remnants and marginalia to metaphors and narrative devices of a text, para-illustration is not simply as a supplement or completion of a text in visual form, but an intervention that reveals a writer’s textual traces as an alternative literary landscape.
Foul Matter is an A4 104 page spiral bound publication, which includes these experimental images and many more. It is part of the project Para-illustration Gaps, fragments and spaces of the literary imagination, a practice-based PhD project undertaken at Kingston School of Art, funded by AHRC and the London Doctoral Design Centre.
