I started to abstract the pictorial quality out of the photographs I had took, reducing them down to basic shapes and forms, and line work. I thought these would be good to construct some kind of pattern that could be used as a contingent theme throughout the zine.

I wanted to create some imagery to represent the tube in London, and the stops I was familiar with when I would take this weekly journal. I have bit of an obsession with collecting Sanpellegrino drink labels, as I really enjoy the bright colours, and when I was arranging them in my journal I was listing to a song by the cribs that mentioned the circle line, and I liked the idea of the labels representing these specific stops on the underground. I also think that the design of the drink labels are reminiscent of the underground symbol anyway.

I had a disposable camera that had half the film used up, half with photos I had taken in London of the journey in question I wanted to depict in the zine, I decided to fill the rest of the camera with imagery from train stations and other landmarks on the journey. I thought these photos would not only be good to feature in the zine but also a good premise to draw from.

As I was not going on the Newyork or Barcelona trips, I was a little worried that the imagery ect.. in the zines I would make would not be as interesting as everyone elses , despite this; rather than making my zines about a specific location or journey, I set out the aim of the project to address a current metaphorical journey of my own. (this is me saying I’m basically making more art about a break up). I wanted to combine and explore a literal and metaphorical journey in this zine. For the literal side of the journey I wanted to depict the weekly journey I would make to London to see my ex boyfriend, and the interest I have in travelling to London, as I am from a small rural market town in the midlands, I would always associate travelling via trains (or any means of transport really) very exiting, as for me getting on a train would always mean escaping a boring town I very much hated living in. This is why I decided to call the zine ”Escaping the Cave”, which is of course also a reference to (Philosopher) Plato’s dialogue of ‘The republic’ in which he outlines the analogy of the cave. Plato’s Cave is essentially a metaphor to explain how Plato believed human empiricism is flawed, and how the world we reside in is a mere shadow of the truth that is supposedly in ‘The realm of forms’, which in his analogy is outside the cave. I thought this was a good metaphorical association with the current journey I wanted to depict in the zine, as I wanted to explore how I had experienced a similar period of enlightenment after the relationship break up, and how sometimes our judgement of things can be flawed by our sensory knowledge.