The Book of the Erinyes

Just a quick announce­ment that I’ve replaced the “Art­work” page on this site with a great little gal­lery script called Plog­ger. I’ve uploaded all the art­work so far, and will keep adding to it over the com­ing weeks.

Any­way, check out the new art­work pages and see what you think.

A very quick post to say that you can fol­low the pro­gress of this pro­ject (and of my other pro­jects) by fol­low­ing me on Twitter.

Just go to twitter.com/lazcorp and click ‘follow’.

I’ve just dropped a mes­sage to Nina—who did some life mod­el­ling for me a year-or-so ago—to see if she’s avail­able to model for the third of the Fur­ies.  If so then I’ll have mod­els for all three, and I’ll feel like this whole pro­ject is on safer ground!

Regard­less of that, I’ve got this com­ing week planned out:

• Monday to Wed­nes­day: fin­ish writ­ing text for the Book of the Erinyes
• Thursday (pay­day!): pay mem­ber­ship at Brighton Print­mak­ing Centre and book use of the Let­ter­press machine
• Sat­urday: buy the first batch of art paper for the pages of the book
• The week after: start com­pos­it­ing the text at the Print­mak­ing centre and start print­ing out the pages

If I can get all that done then I should have some res­ults to post on this site very soon.

It’s look­ing like an increas­ingly busy few months ahead!  I knew this pro­ject would take some con­sid­er­able time right back when I took my Let­ter­press print­ing course back in February-April.

I’ve got most of the text for the Book of the Erinyes writ­ten (you can view it here) and some­time over August/September I will be com­pos­it­ing the text in old lead move­able type, then print­ing it out.

With regards to the art­work, I’ve already done a test set of pho­to­graphs with my artistic partner-in-crime Alice Kemp (who will be tak­ing the role of Megeara) to explore the ini­tial con­cepts.  Hope­fully we’ll be arran­ging the pho­toshoot itself one week­end this month.

Next come the other two Fur­ies.  Abbie has agreed to model for Tisi­phone (hope­fully some­time late Septem­ber), but I’m still look­ing for a model for Alecto.  If you’re inter­ested and you’re in the South-East of Eng­land then let me know!

The pur­pose of this blog is to doc­u­ment the pro­gress of the Book of the Erinyes, a hand­bound lim­ited edi­tion artist’s book.

Frag­ments of text will provide a dis­join­ted par­tial nar­rat­ive to the art­work rather than being an illus­trated story. The text, writ­ten in the style of a late 19^th cen­tury apo­ca­lyptic text tran­scribed by an opium addict, presents an incom­plete nar­rat­ive giv­ing tan­tal­ising insights into the artwork.

The text will be com­pos­ited and prin­ted using old-style mov­able lead type on a Let­ter­press machine at the open access fine art print work­shops run by Brighton Inde­pend­ent Print­makers, so it will have an uneven­ness that you don’t get with word-processed type, remin­is­cent of turn-of-the-century print­ing. Each page will be high qual­ity thick artists’ paper, to give it a great tact­ile æsthetic.

The Book of the Erinyes draws influ­ences from ancient myths, the grow­ing tra­di­tion of artist’s books and altered books, graphic nov­els, the under­ground pop­ular­ity of Let­ter­press print­mak­ing, and authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gene Wolfe.