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Artist’s Books by
Will Cloughley
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ARTIST BOOKS BY WILL CLOUGHLEY Title: ELECTRO JUNGLE One-of-a-kind hand crafted artist’s book Will Cloughley 2011 This book is my humorous/serious take on the issue of electromagnetic pollution in modern urban space. The most visible sources of this pollution are the telephone and high-voltage electrical transmission lines strung from poles throughout our cities, a hold-over from the beginnings of electrification early in the 20th Century. I was inspired by reading Dr. Robert O. Becker’s book, Cross Currents, an early researcher who cited numerous experiments that showed the animal body is attuned to the Earth’s electromagnetic field and insisted that the alteration of this field by technology is likely to have a strange impact. When I was visiting a musician friend, who is also something of a science head, he said, “Listen to the sound of the fan in that computer, now listen to the hum from the fluorescent ballast box; it’s the same note.” He struck a key on his grand piano. “Hear it, the whole industrial infrastructure is tuned to B flat.”
3 My construction utilizes a garish, glowing orange plastic for a cover, that I drilled out in a pattern to attach resistors that would spell the book’s title. The accordion pages are attached to the cover with metal strips, countersunk screws, and adhesive.
The pictures recessed into the paper are my photographs worked in Photoshop to alter the color that, like the orange plastic cover, is intended to suggest an artificial intensification of certain bands of the spectrum just like the pervasive 60 cycle hum. The pictures are accompanied by wild little flash fictions all having to do with paranoia about the electrical environment.
Both sides of the accordion are used for picture and text. The back cover has its own motif.
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Title: RED ROCK, BLACK SUN One-of-a-kind artist book Conceived, written and illustrated by Will Cloughley, 2009 Collaborators: David Dion, sculpture Howard Munson, book binding with wooden cover
RED ROCK, BLACK SUN is a vision quest through the canyon lands of the American Southwest, a philosophical walkabout created by author and visual artist, Will Cloughley, in a format that is a cross between the illustrated story and a graphic novel. The only character in the story is the author’s doppelganger, Silhouette Man, in dialogue with the spirits of a pristine and mystical landscape that has spoken its more-than-human truths to generations of shaman, poets and painters.
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Originally RRBS was created as a one-of-a-kind artist’s book designed to be enclosed in a wooden sculpture that is an abstraction of the sinuous, water-carved forms of the canyon lands.
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It was re-designed for offset publication in collaboration with Wonderella Printed in Berkeley. Subsequent to this I created an animated video from the digital files for the offset book, commissioning an original sound track and performing a voice-over of my own text. This extended project won me the honor of being chosen as one of ten of the Bay Area’s art “Masterminds” by SF Weekly Magazine in 2011. Below are a selection of pages from the original RRBS book:
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10 Here is what various readers have said about RRBS: "A mysterious artifact, radiant with telluric intelligence. The darkly luminous images coalesce with the rhythm of the prose to open the reader into the eroded, stratified, and sinuous topography of the deep bodymind. A glimpse into one pioneer's ongoing exploration into what matters at this teetering moment in our species' unfolding." David Abram, author of "The Spell of the Sensuous" & founder of The Alliance for Wild Ethics "Edward Abbey and his Monkey Wrench Gang would love RED ROCK, BLACK SUN for its beautiful vision of what they really were striving for!" Lawrence Ferlinghetti - poet, painter & founder of City Lights Books "This book took my breath away. I could feel the chaparral organism alive under my feet, the eye of the single lizard, the flow forms of spiral desire. More than anything, in this Black Sun I see my own peaceful death into more existence." Bethe Hagens, PhD - author, anthropology researcher & faculty at Goddard College & Walden University "A masterpiece. Anyone with even the most feeble of magnetic centers will be sent spinning... an active expression of Beauty and as close an approach to Objective Art as to be found in this culture. A piece of Real Work." Stephan Wells "By dent of sheer artistry, Will Cloughley allows us access to the mystery of geologic time, the cross-cut of which shows us the strata of our own evolved, preserved and revealed consciousness in
11 the 'cut-out' persona of Silhouette Man." Charles MacDermed - composer, philosopher & founder of The Yosemite Road Forum "Like the best literature, 'Red Rock Black Sun' is a canyon whose many charms coalesce in its depths." Craig Conley, author of "Magic Words: A Dictionary" "Will Cloughley's drawings and writings in RED ROCK, BLACK SUN are the most comprehensive assimilation I have ever read of how a man and his environment are connected through higher vibrational states of self study. Cloughley is telling each of us to seek out a natural environment that will enable the kind of self examination that is only possible in reciprocity with the more than human realm." Vranas - painter, North Beach muralist & international teacher of The Work "Beautiful book! If you're on the journey toward your authentic self, toward the place where everything interconnects, RED ROCK BLACK SUN will resonate and inform. Especially in how so much transformation happens at the edge of cognition. If you're not yet on the journey, this book could be your seminal inspiration, and the time could be now." Clive Matson, author of "Chalcedony's Songs"
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Title: CYCLING, 2011 hand crafted artist book by Will Cloughley: poetry, drawing, & book block Collaborator: Howard Munson, book cover and slip case
In this book I celebrate the physical joy of bicycling that involves us in a rhythmically pedaled circle moving through space, while using that action as a metaphor for the many cycles that we participate in as we travel through life. I have always been fascinated with cycles in Nature, especially the cyclic concept of Time that informs so many ancient myths. The waxing and waning of the Moon is a cycle readily evident, yet a little mysterious, and periodically punctuated by eclipse.
13 Abstract design motifs are carried through every element of the book from the artwork inside to the book’s cover and slipcase. The book begins with my poem, CYCLING:
Cycles, we insist have a destination. Our feet, one after the other are taking us somewhere. To that end left and right are ingeniously hurried into a circle. Pedaling, all over town. going, returning going, returning While all over the sky streaming clouds vanish to secret places. October sings the octave of light a note lower and the moon, Queen of cycles, turns red with eclipse.
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An ingenious positioning button guides the hand symbolically to the axis of the motion cycle. Mounted on the inside cover, the button fits through a hole on the outside cover.
Book construction permits the panoramic drawing to be displayed like a shoji screen. The drawing by Will Cloughley is executed in graphite, Prismacolor and ink on 100% Lenox rag paper.
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As he travels toward the Queen of Cycles, there is a moving center to his mantra of exertion.
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Title: TRANCE FORMATIONS One-of-a-kind artist’s book, Will Cloughley 2008
For several years I have experienced the music of a band called AXIS MUNDI, a percussion and chant based trance groove ensemble bringing together a didgeridoo player, two female drummers and a chant master who processes his voice with a bank of electronics. Many performances have taken place in private settings for what could be described as a cult following of people
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19 Equipped with a spelunkers headlamp, a large black sketchbook, and a fist full of cartridge brushes, markers and colored pencils, my practice was to lose myself among the dancers and convey the energy of the music to the page with builds of rhythmic strokes and scribbles that might be read as transcriptions of the chantmasters riffs of glossolalia mingled with Indian mantras. When the magic was full strength, the momentum of the gesture would take over in a way that could best be described as trance drawing.
20 From an evening’s involvement I came away with pages of highly charged gestural abstraction that afterward in my studio I read into and elaborated to another level of completion, allowing faces and strange morphologies to appear and “carving� into the white plane of the paper with a rich black that seemed to create openings and fissures to an inner space behind the page.
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First utterances were an effort by our emerging consciousness to codify knowing. First writing was the first abstract gestural art that suffused consciousness with its potent magic, connecting utterance and sign. Man began to live mentally within the structures of his language as physically he began to enclose himself in the grid space of his developing cities. To learn a modern language is to download the epistemic filters that have accumulated centuries of alienation from primal utterance. Yet our physical bodies are immensely complex systems that are at every moment taking in and giving out, interacting and participating with the coarse material and yet-to-be-understood rarefied realms of Earth and beyond. Our cellular structures and musculature remember and still have access to the more-thanhuman domains of being.
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In this work, I join those who in our time have explored trance and free improvisation in the arts as techniques for accessing those inter-connected worlds that are available to us through the spontaneously arising gestures of the body.
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