A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
Thoreau
This week, whilst finalising my piece for Mike Chavez-Dawson’s Re-Covering show (in which artists have been asked redesign the cover of an influential book onto a piece of oak reclaimed from school libraries and cut to standard paperback size), I learned of Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin’s Alias project for the Photomonth photography festival. Their idea was to get selected writers and artists to collaborate: each writer was asked to invent a fictional character and their artistic collaborator then inhabited this imagined persona and created work from within it.
For Re-Covering, I’ve designed a new cover for Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (amazing ideas to work with – thanks Mr. B.) and when I heard about Alias, I thought, ooooh which author would I like to write me a character to inhabit, if I had freedom and power to choose? I wouldn’t choose Bradbury – it would be all too depressingly easy to imagine the world of Fahrenheit 451, as in some ways we’re already in it. I think I’d go for Donna Tartt and scare the crap out of myself for a little while.
