Abstract

A sole authored artists book consisting of 72 pages, 32 photographs and 10 illustrations with English and traditional Chinese text, based on a transcribed folk-tale by Victorian folklorist and writer Marie Clothilde Balfour. One of the projects most distinctive elements will be the conception of the book as 'object', creating a seamless fusion of image, typography, story and folk-tale. The book itself literally becomes a unique 'adaptation' and re-staging and is intended to draw parallels and connections between concepts of artifice, history and myth. The project also draws together some of the special sensations of 'vision in the dark', along with a sense of the macabre and the uncanny, that has been identified in the original short story. This is the first time in over a hundred years that the story in its original form, in Cambridge University Library Archives, has been published. Along with the original text in a Victorian English dialect, the story will be translated and printed in Chinese using traditional calligraphic characters, and in an 'adapted' contemporary English dialect version. The book will be designed around the artist's photographs and video stills that will function as 'illustrations', creating an 'expanded' fusion of the western and eastern traditions of the 'photo/graphic-novel'. Several of its unique and most distinctive features will be the innovative use of conventional offset litho and silkscreen printing on uniquely commissioned materials, text and image which are 'overwritten', through translation and difficult to read transcription in regional dialect and photographs through the use of low resolution image capture, where text and image become temporarily stripped of both linguistic and descriptive functions