new work: the dismemberment of a shoggoth (the once and future king)
The Dismemberment of a Shoggoth (The Once and Future King)
I felt a bit like I was rushing this post, but it being Halloween, it seemed appropriate.
The Dismemberment of a Shoggoth is the first work I’ve executed in a larger series, at present titled The Once and Future King. I would have liked to have had the full artist-statement on the series completed when I posted this image, but it’s still in the works, but meanwhile, here’s a snippet:
Referencing T.H. White’s portrayal of Merlin as a being who experiences time backwards to normal reality, “The Once And Future King” serves as working-title for a large body of work documenting a series of strange, seemingly unconnected events whose causal mechanisms exist outside of normal time and space. While we are privileged to the ‘effects’ described by these events – the disappearance of a student from an abandoned Jeep, a garage where some monstrous Lovecraftian terror emerged and was summarily dispatched, a paradox of a time-travelling book – the ‘cause’ of these events seems entirely unknowable. The events themselves play across a fictional timeline, punctuated by a system of signifiers drawn from actual reality and historical reference.
Playing with the compression of time on a narrative scale, characters stand in the moment, posing, proud, as if in foreknowledge of the future-historical significance of their present context, a hypothetical “spark event” for a cataclysm yet to come. The prophetic mode here references, inversely, the truism “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”; within these narratives, history has already predetermined a far-flung future disaster, and while the immediate causal mechanisms of these seemingly random events is unknowable, the certainty of their eventual impact becomes quite monstrous.
Ideally, when complete, the work will be printed around 60″x90″, and funds permitting, on big beautiful lightboxes. I have included some detail shots below to show the level of “readability” present when viewing the work in person, but I’m hesitant to post a full-resolution zoom.it version at present for a variety of reasons.
More props to the Propnomicon for being an essential resource in the creation of various bloods, goo and otherwise disgusting elements for the scene. Also thanks to my buddy Jer who made me a nice tub of gelatinous congealed grossness he whimsically referred to as “thickened water”. And, as always, my brother for posing for me, and my family for tolerating this level of insanity in their own garage.
Happy Halloween everyone!
bookbinding interlude
I’ve had a side-interest in bookbinding for some time now – I’m even planning a large work in which something I bind is featured – but for now, I’m getting practice making little notebooks, and most recently, a journal for my sister, modeled after that of River Song, from Doctor Who, whose own journal resembles the doors of the TARDIS:
River's Journal
River and the Doctor, both time travellers, encounter each other out of sequence – most typically, the Doctor’s future is River’s past. Eventually both keep a journal, and upon meeting, compare notes to figure out “where they are” in each other’s timeline.
This was the first journal I’ve made that I hard-bound, and it turned out fairly well I think, given the need to emulate the distressed quality of the original:
I’ve been using clearance sketchbooks as a source of cheap, good quality paper for these little journals. It seems a little odd buying a sketchbook, removing the spiral binding (thank god for my stack cutter), and then using the paper to sew and rebind new signatures, but I like the hand-binding process a great deal and I can’t seem to find reams of paper of the same quality for that kind of price. I might be insane.
The rest was matte board and quilting fabric and various odd papers and such, with some acrylic paint to finish.
A few of the resources from which I self-taught on the subject:
Hamish MacDonald’s “DIY Book” blog and podcast – covers the complete self-publishing process from novel-writing to bookbinding to distribution. I originally stumbled upon Hamish via his No Media Kings tutorial on a do-it-yourself-book-press.
MRX Designs – excellent resource for bookbinding and prop-making techniques, which I found via The Propnomicon
Ceropegia’s videos on bookbinding – they’re a little out of order (ok, a lot out of order), and the titles require a bit of knowledge of bookbinding language to decipher, but I learned a whole ton watching these vids.
The previously-mentioned-and-constructed work involving the killing room is almost complete, I’ll post something with a bit of an artist statement as soon as it’s finished-finished. The past nine weeks a litter of seven puppies has been destroying any and all time available for serious “work”.
