Sam Winston gave a talk in the Sallis Benney Theatre as part of Future Selves. I find his working processes and methods behind creating images fascinating. His university project explored language and unconscious writing, he cut out all the words to create a sentence and arranged them to show how many times each word was used and think about each word’s impact. This led to his collaboration with Oliver Jeffers, they created a children’s picture book called ‘A Child of Books’.
The book is beautiful (I really want to order a copy) and the attention to detail is incredible. They created pictures out of words, choosing relevant parts for each page. The image above shows just one example of the intricacy of these illustrations. I also loved the message and adventure of the story itself.
“…what struck me though was how I relied on my sense of sight for a sense of body. Simple things like the bridge of my nose, or my arms, actually play a massive role in defining a sense of self and once these are out of the picture the very definition of ‘you’ significantly changes shape, so much so in fact, that when people came to drop off food, the sensation was much more akin to someone walking into my head as opposed to walking into the room…”
Sam has spent periods of time in the dark, losing time completely, and changing his perception of his own thoughts, and where his physical body starts and ends. He also experiments with other ways of creating, like creating a mark for every exhale, creating patterns and mark-making the rhythms in life. He says himself he isn’t very good at drawing, but this makes him think outside the box when it comes to mark-making. He is very rigorous and has the ability to stay focused drawing repetitive lines and shapes over and over.
Leave a Reply