YES!

Hello there,

I hope you’re well. I’ve been so damned busy recently! Since the start of 2014 the amazing ‘Reframe’ project, (I’ve previously mentioned here and here), has taken me to Algiers, Istanbul and Brussells with my good friends Ilya and Hannah Berry. In those places we meet and made new friends with many great artists and movers and shakers. I feel incredibly lucky to have been involved. In the next couple of week’s I’ll post some photos and sketchbook pages from those trips.

In January I was contacted by Laura Malacart, a cross-disciplinary visual artist,  who had developed a multi-media project built around the portrait of a 27-year-old 'non-verbal' autistic man. In spite of his lack of language, Kyle had found a ‘voice’ through music: Laura Malacart’s work was focussed on the political identity of his ‘non-verbal voice' as well as exploring the complexity of his physical voice in his multifaceted expressions.

Laura commissioned me to make the drawings for a 6-chapter graphic story to be experienced alongside a non-narrative video work called Onomatopoeia. I have drawn the story ‘YES!’ on the basis of her documentary video and photographic material, while and her script reports verbatim conversations collected during months of filming her subjects.  For the launch of the event we have published a limited edition of the story on tabloid format, since she first learned about Kyle from a tabloid clipping.

She conducting the first two symposia at the Dana Centre and King’s College to launch our project and instigate a cross-disciplinary debate around the project’s core themes. Laura is a seriously talented individual who is committed to using her artistic practice to intervene on social issues. I highly recommend you seek her work out and follow her practice and how it develops.

Page 1, Chapter 6, YES

Here are the links to the event’s she’s staging, and the blog I produced to host the comic I drew.

Blog

Event at the Dana Centre this coming Wednesday

Event at King College London on the 26th

This week I got some tremendously exciting news about Helix, the digital comic I worked on last year with David Blandy and Dr Adam Rutherford. I can’t say much now, but will fill you in very soon.

And to top it all off, tomorrow is ELCAF. I’ll be flogging me wares on the Small Press Table alongside many other great artists. It’ll be a total blast!