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Cahill, CB., 2009.

Across The Garden Wall (The Last Lads)

Output Type:Chapter in a book
Publication:Stilled Lives
Publisher:Righton Press

Across the Garden Wall (The Last Lads) is a double page monochrome illustrative contribution to a limited edition artists' book 'Stilled Lives', edited by Jonathan Carson & Rosie Miller. This collaborative publication includes twenty-two cross-disciplinary reinterpretations by artists, designers, writers and poets, of books held by Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections. It was launched in tandem with Carson and Miller's exhibition 'The Story of Things' as an aspect of their research into narrative, memory and collections.

The book addresses the fallowing themes:
Object as catalyst: the potential for narrative within the artifact.
Visualising the remembered narrative: archetype, biography, autobiography.
Authoring and reading the sequential narrative: linear and non-linear approaches.
(Carson and Miller)

'Across the Garden Wall (The Last Lads)' is one outcome of several visual investigations I made for the project. It arose from a personal consideration of the cumulative impact of classic adventure story cover designs arrayed in the Special Collection. Resisting the 'conventional' responses to specific items of textual or image content this work explores the effect of the physical presence of these volumes en mass on the library shelves - their projected 'phenotype', the charged nature of the physical space between the stacks (potentially denuded in a digitized archive) and evocations of a consistent imaginary through the almost interchangeable titles of the publications. The letterforms used on spines and covers of these books present coded renderings of fictional spaces and the paraphernalia of adventure. Collectively they project a quality of yearning through graphic evocations of notional environments and narrative in a physically perceptible way still fundamentally distinct from digital content. In the current 'transitional' period between the paper-based and the fully digital library 'Across the Garden Wall' is intended to graphically register what may be overlooked through the digitization of collections and as a timely contribution to discourse about the value of the book object in a library context.