With just a few days until my Book Week Scotland event, I want to profile the gorgeous artwork I was able to commission to publicise the event.
The illustrator, Garry Mac is a comics artist and PhD researcher at Dundee, concerned with queer time in comics… clearly the right queer for the job. I gave him an open-ended brief, essentially just describing my ideas for the workshop and asking for something eyecatching.
I love the imaginative take on the idea of exploring archives, how the image is clearly someone digging into the past but also has a futuristic atmosphere… this archive could almost be a space ship, the way perspective is working here. And then there are the documents themselves, with strange holes/portals/mirrors (what do you see?) representing the strange fragmented space we enter when trying to find stories in old stuff.
I think the image would make a wonderful writing prompt in itself. Could you write a short story from the perspective of this researcher? How would you interpret the squiggles?
G MacFarlane
It’s funny, when I first saw it, I thought it was like one of the wood fire cooking stoves we use to have. But cooking is not so far away from interacting with the material too…