OUGD404 - Christmas Tasks - Manipulating Type

OUGD404 - Christmas Tasks

Manipulating Type - 

This double page spread utilises copied pages of Cummings’ poems and uses both representational and more abstract imagery to convey images and themes in his poems. The first page is more representational and is based on the fourth poem of Cummings’ ‘Whispers of Mortality’ - a dark and cynical poem he wrote towards the end of his life; the use of x’s and negative space represent the subversion of opposites run the poem, while the image of lips represents one of the lines of the poem - “where seeing eyes go blind, (where lips forget to kiss), Where everything's nothing’. The second page represents a line from the poem ‘Silently, if Out of Not Knowable’ - “You are my sun, my moon, and all my stars” - by showing varying sizes of round objects. The simple geometric shapes represent Cummings’ admiral off the cubist and futurist art movements.

The next set of images were created by warping the text with movement in the photocopier. The first image again represents the cubist and futurist art movements, while the second image focuses less on being representational and more on the interesting forms that can be created by movement and cutting into the pages.

This set of images uses pages from Pablo Neruda’s poetry. The first image is warped using a photocopier and examines the embellishment of certain lines of the poem. The line - “How much of the shadow that is in my soul I would give to have you” is removed and placed onto a shadow on the photocopy as a visual link to the impactful line. The second page utilises the line - “Like a wreck we die to the very core, as if drowning at the heart, or collapsing inwards from skin to soul”. This line is photocopied multiple times, each time becoming more distorted and torn, visually representing the quote. The background image of trees is meant to be evocative of the beautiful Chilean country side which Neruda writes about so much.

This first page takes a line from Neruda’s poem ‘Being Born in the Woods’ - “How long can there odour of the most deeply buried flowers, of the waves most finely pulverised on the high rocks, preserve in me their homeland where they can return to be fury and perfume?”. The quote is set on a path that winds round, reminiscent of wind, smoke or odour. The second image based on Leonard Cohen’s poetry encapsulates the idea of spirituality in his poems by using o’s which are circular and represent the Buddhist concept of reincarnation mentioned in his poems. The image is displaced and photocopied over itself again to make the circles look like eyes, an image abundant in Cohen’s poetry as he examines his age and deterioration and the effects on his face. 

This last image is taken from lines of Cohen’s poem ‘Argument’ and abstractly represents the idea of arguing and confrontation with this bold shape that mimics the shape of a greater than symbol (<). This visually appears like an open mouth but when turned vertical, is reminiscent of diminuendo and crescendo musical notational marks which dictate extreme changes in volume.