Exhibition Catalogue: Arachne Press Ten Years of Book Cover Art

Arachne Press: Ten years of Book Cover Art

Arachne Press is celebrating its tenth anniversary, and with it, successful collaborations with artists on the covers of their books.

Back in 2012 all the publishing chat was about how eBooks were going to replace print, but Arachne founder Cherry Potts was certain that all that would disappear would be ugly, badly made books.

Right from the start the intention was that Arachne’s books would be beautiful, and that where possible, artists would be used, and the cover image would wrap all the way round the book.

When choosing a manuscript, if Cherry starts planning the cover before she’s finished reading, the book is almost certainly going to be published, which means that the search for the right artist is as important as the search for new writing.

Initially that meant licensing existing images, but quickly moved on to commissioning as well. Arachne Press has worked with some of our artists regularly, [Kevin Threlfall, Fiona Humphrey, Gordy Wright] others have been suggested by the authors for a particular project [Paul Summers, Camille Smethwick, Rachel Marsh]; and sometimes Cherry rolls up her sleeves and makes a cover herself.

19th Jan - 15th Feb 2023

Stephen Lawrence Gallery

Arachne Press

10 Stockwell Street 100 Grierson Road London London SE10 9BD SE23 1NX http://www.greenwichunigalleries.co.uk arachnepress.com

Annie Rickard Straus

Lovers’ Lies [Digital print from Screen Print]

Annie is a fine art printmaker based in London. After completing her studies at Central St Martins and Glasgow School of Art, she began creating illustrations and lettering for a range of organisations and brands across the UK and beyond. She came back to printmaking in 2017 as an outlet for more abstract, colourful, and less commercial work.

She loves screen-printing for the possibility of quantity and scale, and is obsessed with colour and how each layer sits together, each informing the last and next. At the heart of her work is energy, colour, and balance.

Annie is a member of the Printmakers Council, and East London Printmakers, she regularly exhibits with both.

Annie submitted to our competition for the cover of Lovers’ Lies and won the authors’ vote.

Bev Sommerville

Let Out the Djinn [Acrylic on hand-made paper]

Bev was suggested to us for Let Out the Djinn by poet Jane Aldous. When Bev created this design she was doing a lot of abstract painting, and the title of the book made her imagine a kind of positive chaos, movement and change. This was the thought behind the design and she used acrylic paint and the edge of a bank card instead of a brush to produce it in a suitably chaotic and rapid manner.

In keeping with the chaos effect, we added the title as though it were part of the vortex of motion.

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Camille Smithwick

She Wolf and Imp [photograph of original sculpture] Incorcisms

Camille is a sculptor and photographer from the north of England who makes papier maché models and photographs them in sets of her making. She was recommended for the cover of Incorcisms by author David Hartley.

I enjoyed the feel this image has of a 1970’s psychology text. We ended up using only a detail of Camille’s disturbing image, as we wanted the humour of the sinister, as it is in the stories in Incorcisms, to be foremost.

Cherry Potts

An Outbreak of Peace Noon

Solstice Shorts We/She

Cherry is Director of Arachne Press, for whom she is editor/co-editor of most of our anthologies, and runs the annual literature and music festival Solstice Shorts. She commissions and sometimes designs our book covers.

Cherry trained as a photographer, and uses manipulated photographs (her own and others) and typography for her cover designs, often using found objects as a starting point – a series of clocks and a glass paperweight have served for Solstice Shorts anthologies and posters on several occasions. For We/She, an anthology that features both dragons and broken plates, a cracked plate was broken, and the dragon design from a Chinese style plate edited onto the broken pieces.

For The Significance of a Dress, Cherry collaborated with poet Emma Lee, using Emma’s needlepoint image of a wedding dress in a charity shop, layered up many times, and handembroidering the title.

Ed Boxall

Devilskein & Dearlove [lino print, commission]

The Old Woman from Friuli [lino print, commission]

Ed is an artist, writer, performer and educator from Hastings. He works in lino print, and we first commissioned a cover from him for Young Adult fantasy novel, Devilskein & Dearlove, by Alex Smith, going through many possible drafts.

We went back to Ed for the cover and interior illustrations for The Old Woman from Friuli, by Ghillian Potts, a younger reader’s Italian fairy tale. We tweaked and coloured the original print for the Old Woman herself, for the cover, deliberately using slightly off register colour blocks to mimic a hand printed style.

Emma Lee

The Significance of a Dress [Needlepoint]

Emma is a poet who we have published many times. The Significance of a Dress was her debut collection and hinges on refugee camp experiences. When not writing Emma stitches This needlepoint is based on Emma’s own photograph of a wedding dress in a charity shop. The titles for the book were embroidered by Cherry Potts,

Fiona Humphrey

Bempton Cliffs III [print from digital file] Mamiaith

After the Viaduct IV [original linocut]100neHundred Where Shadows Fell III [print from digital file] A Pocketful of Chalk

Fiona is an artist-printmaker based in Leicestershire, an elected member of the Leicester Society of Artists and of the Printmakers Council. She works mainly with linocut from her home studio producing original prints, monoprints and collages.

Fiona is another Instagram find. We first licenced an image from Fiona for Mamiaith, by Ness Owen, aware of the irony of using a picture inspired by Bempton cliffs in Yorkshire for a book rooted in Ynys Môn, on the far side of the British Isles.

We’ve been back twice more, fascinated by her mark making and strong graphic interpretations.

100neHundred by Laura Besley ( a fellow resident of Leicestershire) is 100 stories of 100 words, and the marks on After the Viaduct IV contained within the overall shape, really spoke to me of all those precise words – so far, I’ve resisted counting them.

A Pocketful of Chalk by Claire Booker explores the South Downs, delving into archaeology, life history and fantasy in strong ecological poems, and Fiona’s Where Shadows Fell series strongly suggests a chalk headland, and a flint hagstone. More

Gail Brodholt RE

Snow in the Suburbs [digital copy of lino print] Stations

Gail is a leading painter and printmaker of contemporary urban landscapes. She finds that working in one medium informs and enhances the other. She has published two lithographs in collaboration with the Curwen Studio. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of PainterPrintmakers (RE). Gail was born in South London to immigrant parents, her father Norwegian and her mother from Trinidad.

I suppose what I’m really interested in is those unconsidered and unnoticed places that people pass through. They are on their way to somewhere else, presumably more important – on the escalators, on the tube, train station platforms, motorways...

We licensed this image from Gail for our second anthology, Stations, darkening it to make it more of a dusk image, and slightly trimmed it to fit the cover. It remains a favourite of mine. The original lino print is still available for sale! more information/

Gordy Wright

Brat, Spellbinder and Wolftalker (The Naming of Brook Storyteller)

A Gift of Rivers

[Digital prints of gouache/acrylic paintings.]

Gordy is a freelance illustrator, printmaker and picture book maker who grew up by the North Yorkshire moors and then moved to Bristol to study illustration at the University of the West of England, graduating with a first class honours. He is now based in Scotland and works on a variety of publishing and editorial projects. He evokes a natural, textured feeling in his illustrations which are painted by hand in gouache and acrylic.

We first found Gordy at his degree show, but it was a while before the right project came up. We commissioned Gordy to provide the three covers for our Young Adult fantasy trilogy, The Naming of Brook Storyteller, by Ghillian Potts.

When looking for the right artist for A Gift of Rivers, I knew I wanted an image of the dykes and polders outside Amsterdam, seen from an airplane to echo the title poem, and it was my memories of that degree show, and a ‘from the air’ image of coral reefs that meant I again asked Gordy for a cover. I love the suggestion of both stained glass and wooden toy village in Gordy’s image.

Kam Rehal

Story Cities [relief print/digital]

Kam is Programme Leader for BA(Hons) and HND Graphic and Digital Design at University of Greenwich. He has a broad range of commercial design experience across environmental graphic design for museums, galleries and physical spaces, book and editorial design for publishing, art direction and design management, and has frequently collaborated with other artists, writers and makers. Kam is currently a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in Communications Research.

Kam was one of our editors for Story Cities, and also designed the entire book. An early draft of what ended up being the cover was used for the call out. The blocks, which repeat throughout the book, were printed using sections of a Neoprene bath mat.

Karen Boissonneault-Gauthier

No Spider Harmed in the Making of This Book [Photo Collage]

Karen is an Ontario Indigenous writer and photographer. Her images are produced intuitively using digital photography. As an internationally published person, she cut her teeth creating written and visual works for the best companies, corporate magazines and literary publications. Karen has been nominated “Best of the Net” artist for 2022.

We met Karen first as a writer, as a contributor to Solstice Shorts Noon. She happened to mention she was also a photographer, and when we were looking for a cover for No Spider Harmed in the Making of This Book, I was reminded of her collages.

Karen Keogh RE

City Rooftops [Photo Etching NFS] London Lies

Misty River [Two Plate Etching £220 unframed] Foraging

Karen’s work consists of vibrantly coloured, two- and three-plate etchings and painterly monotypes, which take the landscape for inspiration. Karen is a Member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers she regularly shows at the Royal Academy Exhibition nad she has work held in the Ashmolean Museum and the University of Aberystwyth Print Collection.

The original sketch for Misty River was made in Canada. Working on a zinc plate, Karen draws the image onto the plate, which has a layer of beeswax on it. The plate is immersed in nitric acid to bite into the metal.This creates the equivalent of a line drawing to work with.The next stage is to add tone with a process called Aquatint. This creates small dots on the plate. Areas are now painted out with an acid resist varnish to keep some areas white, and can progress through to the darkest tone. Karen makes the dark plate first. This usually has the most detail. The image is then offset onto another plate, so that she knows where to create line and tone on the second plate. The Aquatint process is repeated. For each etching, the plates are printed on top of each other with great precision using heavy metal blocks to place the plates in the exact position before they are rolled through the etching press.

We licensed City Rooftops from Karen for our very first book, London Lies. We went back for Misty River for poetry collection Foraging, and keep an eye on what she’s up to with new books in mind.

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Kevin Threlfall

Lost Landscape [oils] With Paper

for

Feet Darkness Follows [oils] Unmothered Erratics, More Patina than Gleam, In Retail, Weird Lies, Happy Ending NOT Guaranteed [Digital] Departures, Accidental Flowers, Strange Waters, [Digital based on oil paintings]

Working in an expressive and intuitive way, Kevin captures experiences that are fleeting and that dissolve into the next; memories of places held together by rhyming connections of shape, line and colour. The painting process focuses on the interaction of layers and images. Over time ideas coalesce and the painting eventually comes in to focus, at that point it quickly moves to a final, definitive image. Some works have residues traces of their source images, others remain more undefined, creating intriguing marks that can appear abstract at first glance.

We have worked with Kevin repeatedly, from his first submission for the cover of Weird Lies in 2013 through to the yet to be published Unmothered. What keeps us coming back is his wide variety of styles, anything from oil paintings (With Paper for Feet) to entirely graphic designs (In Retail) and everything in between. We particularly appreciate his collaborative approach to commissions, sending us 3 or 4 starting images which he manipulates until we are all happy, and his willingness to involve the authors in the process, such as using the poet’s own thumbprint and handwriting for Erratics, and incorporating the poet’s toy robot in the cover of More Patina than Gleam.

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Klara Smith

Zed and the Cormorants [Paper Cuts] initial and final design. Paper Crusade [Paper Cuts] initial and final design.

Armed with a scalpel and solid knowledge of print design, Klara is a paper artist and freelance graphic designer.

Papercut images hide a secret world. They tell one story in their flat state and a completely different one when light paints through them a world of distorted shadows. That’s why Klara calls what she does ‘shadowmaking’. While there is one original papercut, framed and casting ever changing shadows she transforms it into images enhanced with colours and textures on her iPad.

Sunlight is the best shadowmaker, sometimes the shadows are soft and fuzzy, sometimes neat and sharp. And they move and stretch as the sun moves. In the absence of sunlight you can make a good use of your mobile’s torchlight! Go on, turn it on and ‘shadowmake’ using the papercuts which are on display here.

We first worked with Klara on Zed and the Cormorants, having seen her shadow pictures on Instagram. We felt that the shadowy expression of the image worked perfectly with the gothic supernatural undertone of Zed. We went back to Klara for Paper Crusade because, with its paper masks and torn pages, her work was the obvious match for the cover. more information/contact/sales

Komal Modar

Blue Echo [limited edition print] Where We Find Ourselves

Red Earth Triptych [Oils] Words from the Brink

Komal is a multi-media artist, born in the UK to Indian parents. She works across a range of media, from painting, film, sculpture, and installation. She creates mixed-media paintings which incorporate materials such as heavily textured impasto, pigment powders, straw, textiles, and various found objects. Komal’s Indian heritage is an important part of her identity and has profoundly influenced her approach to art.

We first worked with Komal on Where We Find Ourselves, on the recommendation of our marketing specialist, Saira Aspinall. For such a diverse anthology it was essential that we chose an artist who was in tune with the work, but also did not use representational images, as it would inevitably leave some one out, and Komal’s abstract paintings really excited us. Red Earth was my first choice for the cover, but I was persuaded by the editors that it was too ‘volcanic’ for the book, and I used it for our climate crisis anthology Words from the Brink, instead; choosing Blue Echo, with is suggestion of a rough sea and constellations that could perhaps be used to navigate, for Where We Find Ourselves.

Both artworks are for sale More information/contact/sales Buy the Books

Melina Traub

Mosaic of Air [digital design]

Born in New Zealand, raised in Los Angeles, California, Melina’s artistic career started in the early 1980’s creating relief paintings and wooden sculpture, holding exhibitions in Los Angeles and in London where she had a studio in Covent Garden, creating jewellery for leading fashion designers. She now lives near Bath.

She has exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Aspects Gallery in London, the Craft Museum in Los Angeles and boutique showrooms of Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles.

Over the years her work has been guided by the emergence of the digital realm, with drawing, painting and collage still forming the basis of her creative process.

Melina has produced books covers, illustrations, and artwork for advertisement and fashion.

This design for Mosaic of Air was originally submitted in our competition for Lovers’ Lies, for which it came second; and was adapted to suit the then forthcoming Mosaic of Air, making use of the characters and themes of one of the key stories to provide replacement words for the design.

More information

Natasha Emily Lynch

Eider/Cormorant [digital image from oil sketch on canvas] The Arctic Diaries

Natasha is a visual, multi-disciplinary artist interested in transmitting the feelings of joy and tranquillity she feels when making, to the viewer of her work. Trained in woven textile design (Chelsea College of Arts, First Class BA(Hons) and MA Design (MMU), Natasha is an artist who lets thought dictate material meanderings. Primarily working with drawing and painting, she also uses sculpture, textiles, film and poetry depending on what the idea longs for. She was suggested to us by author Melissa Davies, whose collection is inspired by a residency in Norway, where Natasha has also worked.

Eider was originally the draft image for what was going to be a woodcut, but we liked it so much we decided to use the sketch in preference to the finished item. Natasha often prints onto sailcloth or sheep fleece, and we decided to replicate the sailcloth for the cover.

The dynamism of this painting reflects a state of mind Natasha reached during her summer in Fleinvær. It was a deeply emotional and abundant period of her life, where her painting style matched her mood. The painting was made on canvas, very quickly and is a mix between a cormorant and Eider duck, birds that are seen and have history with fishing islands.The canvas is now is glued on the ceiling of one of the houses in The Arctic Hideaway, flying south.

More Information pre-order the book

Nina Thomas

What Meets the Eye [Photo collage]

Nina is a Deaf artist photographer and film maker. She was recommended to us by editor Lisa Kelly who had worked with her before, on the cover of Magma’s Deaf Issue, for the cover of our Deaf anthology, What Meets the Eye, the Deaf Perspective. We were delighted to work with a deaf artist for this book. The theme for the anthology was movement, and Nina’s design, using multiple collaged and layered photographic images, strongly evokes that theme.

Paul Summers

Covid Bloom [Giclée Print] This Poem Here

Paul is a writer, artist & amateur archaeologist. For the last couple of years he’s spent most daylight low-tides meticulously excavating an old shipwreck on a promontory of rock at the mouth of the River Tyne. In between digging for artefacts, he spends a considerable amount of time staring out at the ever changing liminal where the North Sea meets the sky. Both his recent writing & images are heavily influenced by these expansive seascapes.

Paul was recommended for the cover of This Poem Here by the author, Rob Walton. Paul sent a square of 4 versions of this print, and I patched together the cover from multiple versions of that. I love the way the reds glow, and that he made something beautiful from the Corona Virus.

Phil Barnett

Mist 4 [photograph] In the Blood

Phil Barnett is a poet and photographer who describes himself as a ‘patch watcher’. Phil’s first incarnation as a patch watcher was enforced. A decade long stretch of chair-bound illness largely confined him to a living room. His patch was the view through the window. Luckily he had an obsession with birds. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that he spent 10 years looking out of a window, recording and documenting everything. Although Phil is still affected by illness, his body is in better working order and his patch is now daily walks around an area of fairly ordinary countryside in South Lancashire, looking for the ways he can respond to nature – to his patch through writing, poetry, music, and photography. I’ve known Phil’s work for a while now, connecting over lockdown through the Daily Haiku page on Facebook, where Phil illustrates his poetry with extraordinary photographs, often of spider webs, which inevitably caught my attention.

This photograph was chosen for our novel, In the Blood, by Anna Fodorova because the climactic scene takes place in the near dark, in parkland known as Wild Šárka in Prague.

Rachel Marsh (Semple Press)

A Voice Coming from Then [Letterpress]

Rachel is an artist working in letterpress, film photography, and artists books. She is also a freelance journalist (writing for magazines such as Printmaking Today), and a graphic designer working for Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. These three very different ways of working reinforce each other, so that her writing helps her creative practice, which in turn affects her design work.

Rachel was suggested to us by Jeremy Dixon the author of A Voice Coming from Then.

Many of the poems in the book makes use of the Victorian ‘demon’ Spring-heeled Jack, and Rachel created a cover design with the feel of a Victorian playbill or circus poster.

Sarah Hopkins

Araf [photo etching] A470

Sarah is a printmaker living in South Wales. Her work explores man-made landscapes with a focus on industrial and urban environments. In both industrial and agricultural settings, we shape, manipulate and modify the land for our own gain. In doing so, the architectural shapes and patterns we create form part of our cultural landscape, and communicate the history and heritage of a place.

Through printmaking techniques, Sarah challenges herself to explore new ways to present her observations. Her aim is to elevate negatively perceived environments; the places we pass every day and fail to notice or choose to ignore; and to give them a voice.

We spent a long time searching for the right cover for A470. As soon as I saw Araf, I knew, this was it.

Suman Gujral

Story plate [etching plate] Routes

During her MA, Suman’s research into the history of printmaking in India revealed the impact of the 1947 Partition of India on all aspects of life on the sub-continent and on her own family’s history which inspired a deeper interest in the effect of local and global traumas on individuals and communities. This led to Suman’s current work on the migrant crisis and its roots. These issues can be painful to think about but she believes that artists are in a unique position to act as agents for change by provoking conversations through their work. Suman make abstract work, stemming from her own response but which can be interpreted by the viewer from their own perspective.

Suman came to one of our readings for Where We Find Ourselves and got in touch at which point I realised I’d been following her on Instagram for a while. We had a zoom call where she walked me round her studio via her laptop and we talked about whether it was appropriate to use such personal work for other uses, and I talked about Rhiya Pau’s book, Routes. We agreed that we were all on very much the same wave length, and chose a photograph of Story plate (the actual plate, rather than a print from it) for its capacity to be interpreted both as a map and a family tree, and the scars on the surface perfectly representing the themes in the book. I colourised the image to make it warmer, but otherwise it is untouched.

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Tom Charlesworth

The Knotsman [Initial design and final ink drawing, final cover image]

How to Be a Tarot Card (or a Teenager) [Initial design and final ink drawing, final cover image]

Tom is an illustrator based in Frome in Somerset. He creates intricate illustrations filled with unspoken narrative, often incorporating themes from myth, folklore and legend. We first found Tom on Instagram, when we were looking for a cover for The Knotsman by Math Jones, that would suggest the woodcuts of sixteenth and seventeenth century broadsheets, and also used traditional Celtic knotwork, with the important difference, that it must be incomplete.

We kept the monochrome of the final drawing, and reversed it, to emphasise the darkness of the poems, and to make the cover more robust.

Tom was the obvious person to ask when we again wanted to evoke a medieval print style for Jennifer A McGowan’s How to be a Tarot Card (or a Teenager), but this time working in colour. We went through several iterations before going with traditional Tarot red and blue. More

Tom Dingley

Outcome [digital photographs]

Gregory Gaige

Hizze Fletcher-King

Susan Hailes

Lewis Hancox

Femi Otitoju Lola Lasagne

Peter Tatchell

Born and raised in Greenwich, London, Tom studied photography at college and then at Greenwich University. As a photographic artist and commercial photographer Tom had held several exhibitions, but Outcome was his largest project in portraiture. The project was to photograph members of the LGBT community with photos of themselves as children, to show how far they’d travelled.

I got involved initially as a subject, and then suggesting other people as subjects, the whole time thinking what a great book it would make. Eventually I bit the bullet and asked, and with a crowd fund that raised twice what we needed, the book was published, and launched with multiple exhibitions around the UK. The cover design (by Cherry Potts) is a composite image using several portraits from the book, the intention was that the silvery cover would suggest a mirror and include the viewer.

Tom’s commercial photography website Buy the Book

Zoë Lee

The Other Side of Sleep [preparatory study and final photographed paper set.]

Zoë is an artist, illustrator and graphic designer for Big Potato games including Rainbow Rage, Scrawl, Umm app, OK Play, Qwordie and Mr Lister’s Quiz Shootout.

I found Zoë’s work while she was still at college, and thought her roughs were so beautiful I was almost disappointed by the final image. Zoë’s combination of paper cuts and a built set was a bit of a surprise, and not the typical poetry book cover, but once I’d adjusted my expectations, I loved it. Buy the Book