I love books and art and science and history, especially when you combine them: and it is possible, none are separate entities, intended only for a select few.They all influence each other and work together to capture a moment or idea, only in different ways, and the beauty is that everyone sees something different.
This project was inspired by crossing these boundaries, exploring the relationship between the illustration and the written word, both of which have extraordinary power. And I hope the results did them justice.
The idea behind this project was taking well known illustrations out of context and using them to illustrate other, unrelated texts- I focused mostly on John Tenniel's drawings for Alice in Wonderland and E.H. Shepard's Winnie the Pooh drawings. My first thought was with Robert Frost poetry, because they have wonderful imagery of forests in the Autumn, but also the underlying themes of death, childhood and nostalgia - particularly interesting when you think about this in relation to the children's texts.
As I explored the idea more, I found myself being drawn to Shakespeare plays, especially the darker scenes in them, like those of murder in Macbeth and Othello, or the cannibalism in Titus Andronicus (notorious for being Shakespeare's bloodiest play) - would you think of Winnie-the-Pooh differently if you saw him reaching for the 'dagger which I see before me' just before he goes off to murder Duncan, or Alice as the fairy queen Titania becoming infatuated with Bottom? Would you be disturbed by it? It's been really interesting to see how far I can push the images and how much I can twist them for them still to be those familiar characters.
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