Cloth

An exploratory work about storytelling, landscape, and fabrics. I like to see the ground as a cloth that wraps our planet with its creases, hills, valleys, and tears. By depicting landscapes on top of cloth or by placing them within a scene, I sought to depict this connection between the two. Because many stories involve a journey, they are, by extension, set within a landscape. I alluded to a few well known pieces of writing in the work, from the foreground, with a figurine of Wilbur the pig from Charlotte’s Web (the plaque is spelled incorrectly to avoid copyright infringement), the apple (an element in many stories), to the croc-wearing giant (again a common trope in folk tales and myths) moving through a field.

The work was made during a time when I was experimenting with loose grids of elements within a larger image, as opposed to how I was working before this, where my illustrations were a collection of panels. This loose alignment allows for new compositions and interesting juxtapositions, such as the blue cloth, which is a vertical element and continues the direction of the tree it covers. Or the relationship the spikes in the background of the central panel have with the larger image behind it, ‘pointing’ at or segmenting the scene. Playing with a combination of representational and graphic elements in such a unique way, enabled by this new framework, was an informative endeavour.