Issue #2: Time & Nostalgia by Unknown Magazine (York)

UNKNOWN Time & Nostalgia

Issue 2

A Note From The Editor

Contents

Following the abstract start we made with ‘Dreams and the Surreal’, we wanted to branch out into chartered territory through unusual mediums. We ventured into the past to find lost stories, jumbled memories and to relive unforgettable experiences. The discussion of how nostalgia manipulates our memories and why our past becomes part illusion intrigued us. Time seems constantly present, it is always with us, yet we know so little about it and seems hard to pin down. These were crucial elements we wanted to explore but a big thank you must go to all those who joined our discussion. A publication is only as strong as the contributions and the people dealing with them. Without the hard working and dedicated editing team, none of this would have been possible. For those that performed, helped organise or just came to support Unknown at the ‘Timeless’ fundraiser, we hope you keep supporting us. Finally, to you the reader, we hope you enjoy exploring this publication and look forward to bringing you more. Editor-In-Chief Raphael Reuben

Philosophy Editor Alex Bryan

Film Editors Matt Conn Daniel Golton

Visual Arts Editor Anna Gammans

Layout Editor Kathryn Burke Literature Editors Elinore Court Holly Ranfield

Unearthed Holly Ranfield

Those Were The Days Raphael Reuben

Time Talk Alex Bryan

Russian Ark Daniel Golton

The Forgotten War Malcolm Coates

Time Tyer Sukie Baker

Interview With Young Filmmaker Sam Boullier Matt Conn

Illustrator Hannah Wallace Proof Reader Vivienne Mah Webmaster Jack Turner

Front cover image - Irina & Silviu Szekely Back cover image - Hannah Wallace

16 -17

Stockholm Winters Roosa Päivänsalo

Interview With Pamela Hartshorne Elinore Court & Holly Ranfield

Art - Stripped To Its Roots Katherine Caddy

Music Editor Jack Davis

Robbe-Grillet’s ‘La Jalousie’ Kathryn Burke

26 - 31

Haddasi Reuben - Landscape

Robbe-Grillet’s ‘La Jalousie’

Unearthed

Writers often look to the past for inspiration and this process has resulted in some of our most prized literature. There is a long-standing literary tradition of writing about the past and documenting key historical moments as snap shots in time, to pass this knowledge on through the generations. Even in Medieval times, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s historiographical text Historia Reggum Brittaniae was a prominent feature of popular culture.

Jamesian approach, with very little action, but rather a preoccupation with the husband’s internal deciphering of the world around him. This peculiar style may at first seem tedious, but as the plot continues and the same minor events (such as seeing a caterpillar on the wall) are repeated, the reader can begin to appreciate the author’s remarkably modernist argument: truth is in the eye of the beholder and time is a malleable concept.

There is always a danger, when turning back to childhood favourites, that you will be disappointed by what you find. This is not so with Peter Pan. The prose remains invitingly vibrant and fantastical, inviting us back into Barrie’s world of magic and wonder.

Since the Medieval times, there have been a number of developments in the ways in which writers document time as literature has evolved. The turn of the twentieth century saw a relaxation of the relationship between time and narrative. Classics such as Virginia Woolfe’s Mrs Dalloway experiment with a free indirect style to denote a stream of consciousness in the present tense; whilst F.Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby lamented the loss of a moment in time and explores the relationship between a man and his past. The twentieth century witnessed a new trend: time was no longer a necessity for the progression of a plot, but had been deemed worthy of subject matter, as well as something which could be manipulated to formulate modernist illusions of narrative structure.

The constant telling and re-telling of seemingly insignificant details within the setting of sweltering heat makes the reader feel as if they are witnessing a particularly bizarre dream. Robbe-Grillet carries the reader through this labyrinth of inconsistent time, paranoia and the illusion of time being linear.

Kathryn Burke

French author Alain Robbe-Grillet took the manipulation of time and narrative style one step further in his novel Jealousy. He plays masterfully with the complex matter of time in an innovatively non-linear way, framing this alongside the demise of the protagonist’s mental state as he descends so far into jealousy that even the reader cannot untangle the truth.

I cannot recommend Jealousy highly enough, it is the only novel I know where you could start in the middle and read backwards with the argument remaining the same - there is certainly some genius in that alone.

Author - Holly Ranfield Illustration - Hannah Wallace

However, my perspective altered when I gained knowledge of the tragic basis for the novel. Knowing that Barrie based Peter on his older brother, who died just before his 14th birthday, affords my re-reading a more poignant tone. Peter is not simply a young boy who represents all of our fears about growing up; he is also a child who cannot move beyond the world of childhood and imagination. Barrie’s mother found comfort in the fact that her son would remain a child forever, never to leave her – or us. It is hard not to hear the voice of an indulgent older brother recounting tales about missing shadows and creating a world full of friends for him, on top of a face-value, child-like awe at Peter’s heroic deeds. We read Peter Pan, love it (and him), then, like Wendy, cast him off to move onto adulthood. Meanwhile, he remains behind in his fantasy world to befriend the next generation of believers. He deserves a revisit.

The story takes place in a chalet situated on a plantation where a man and his wife are staying and is told from the point of view of the husband who suspects his wife of adultery. The novel adopts a

Those Were The Days Raphael Reuben

As a child, we had a forest filled with mystery and enchantment attached to the house. Time and structure never mattered to us back then. Every weekend, my brothers and I would explore uncharted territory. As long as the sun stayed out, we stayed out. There was a special tree in the centre of the forest. This tree was tall and branchless; it climbed so high that it cut through the sky. No matter how long you stared, you could never see the top. Apart from the tree, we had a big patch of dirt. This was no ordinary dirt. Sometimes we’d sift through it like archaeologists to find small pieces of sparkly red treasure, pieces of a broken puzzle. Scattered around, finding it was the easy part; figuring out how it fit together was the challenge. If we weren’t sifting, we were digging. All kinds of objects from the past were waiting to be found. All the things that had been lost through the ages, past secrets lying in wait of being discovered, our

imaginations would get the better of us, but all the more reason to dig! I always dreamt of digging so deep that I’d uncover a house, a house that had been covered by dirt and forgotten about, but I ran out of time. I will never forget the day when our forest came under attack. Chainsaws came with men and began chopping down our beloved tree. It didn’t look so tall with its lifeless and broken parts scattered beside it. They suffocated our dirt and covered our treasure. We never even got to say goodbye. Today the forest is a beautiful garden, with a path and pretty flowers. The dirt patch has become a garden house where we still spend most of our time, but there is no place to dig, no treasure to be found, no tall tree to wonder about. The men took it all away, but I will never forget those beautiful days. They could never take my memory of those days away.

Art Ramce - Searching For Tomorrow’s Dream

Time Talk Alex Bryan

In the Western world, we tend to think of time as something beyond human influence - marching ceaselessly onward as we struggle to keep up. We talk about ‘being on time’, ‘wasting time’, ‘not having any time.’ We sometimes personify it, depicting Time as a bearded old man with an hourglass. So strong is the conviction that time functions in this way, that every so often pop culture seduces and tantalises us with the prospect of controlling time. The films In Time, where people stop ageing at 25 and die at 26 unless they ‘earn’ time to live beyond that, and Click, where the protagonist has the power to pause, fast-forward and rewind time, may not go down as classics, but highlight the wider Western notion of time as independent of human action, hence the corresponding urge to conquer it. It might seem true that this is how time works. After all, we know nothing different. But some people seem to speak in ways that don’t reflect this idea, with languages that provide a different way of talking about time. Perhaps the best-known example of a language that expresses notions of time very different from our own is that spoken by the Hopi people, native to Arizona. The Hopi language has been a source of great controversy since the 1930s, when linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf claimed that the Hopi language supported the idea that one’s language and world-view are intimately connected and often influence each other. Whilst disagreement flared over the precise nature of the way the Hopi language characterises time, it has become clear that it does so in a way that is distinctly different from the way we do. This is not a peculiarity of the Hopi language either. The language of the Amazonian Pirahã tribe has been described as operating from the underlying principle that reality is only what one currently experiences, a claim that has attempted to explain the general apathy displayed by the Pirahã towards the past and future. A study of the Amondawa tribe (also from the Amazon) claims that their language does not contain the idea of abstract time as independent from human action.

For us in the West, the notion of time existing independently of us as humans is fundamental to our engagement with and understanding of the world. The fact that those who speak other languages might not experience this as we do doesn’t mean that the western conception is wrong, or that we have any ability to change our conception of time. For instance, in societies that have an economic system that relies on the precise measurement of time (like ours), it is essential that the society’s language frames time as something that can be precisely measured. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t relate to those who talk about and experience time in ways we don’t. Fundamentally, all of us are affected by time in ways beyond our control. The ways we interpret and experience this can provide us with remarkable insight into both the nature of time and human existence. By remembering the variety of ways that time can be talked about, we can better understand the subjectivity of our standard model and perhaps even move beyond our limited conceptions, to explore others.

Felicia Morizet

The Forgotten War

Russian Ark Daniel Golton

Imagine yourself floating through an eighteenth-century winter palace. As you glide from one room to another, you see vignettes from history play out in front of you, as if occurring for the first time: Peter the Great haranguing one of his generals, Russian ladies in all their finest clothes at an opulent ball and a desperate citizen of Leningrad, building his own coffin with the Nazis at the gates. This is the concept of the ambitious Russian Ark (2002), a ninety-minute unbroken shot, taken from the perspective of our narrator as he ghosts around Peter the Great’s Winter Palace, guided by a pompous French diplomat. The movie makes distinctive use of two common filmic techniques to show the two modes of the passing of time: shot-duration and contextual use of props, costume and setting (mise-en-scène). The study of shot length is called “cinemetrics” and was first devised by film scholar Barry Salt in the 1970s to systematically compare ASL (average shot length) between films. The Cinemetrics database lists Ark as the movie with the longest ASL of any narrative film. Experimental pieces such as Empire (Warhol) have been longer but few attempts to make a single-shot story-driven production on this scale have ever succeeded. Hitchcock famously tried to do this with his 1948 thriller Rope, but was limited by the technology of the day, which only allowed to him shoot in ten-minute sections due to the length of the 35mm reels. Filmmakers usually use extended shots to show an event occurring in real time (like in Rope). Some would argue that this leads to an increase in intensity, as demonstrated by another recent one-shot film, Silent House, where the lack of cuts only exists to build the tension whilst the occupants of a building are stalked. More importantly however, long shots increase immersion in a film by providing the viewer with a consistent experience where the suspension of disbelief (or our accepting of the extraordinary stuff we see on screen) is distilled from the distracting presence of cuts. Spanish

director Pedro Almodovar specifically has quite short shots, for the explicit purpose of separating the viewer from his narratives. In Ark it is clear that the aim of the director is to create something more than a gimmick but an experience in which, like the narrator, we feel comfortable to just sit back and observe. During the film we witness many scenes from Russia’s turbulent past. Without cuts to carry us between these moments, we instead move through the timeline (not necessarily in chronological order) by simply stepping through doors or glancing through windows. Much like in A Christmas Carol, the narrator and his companion are not always visible to those around them, though they seem to be able to change this at will. With this in mind, the only way to make clear of the change in period is the spectacular use of costume and set. Whilst in conventional cinema the passing of a long section of time is signified by a cut or a fade, here the sudden variation in mise-en-scène is enough for even a viewer not familiar with differing trends in Russian fashion to perceive the temporal jump. As the French diplomat concludes, it is like watching actors in a play. On this note, we see that Russian Ark provides a more immediate experience for the audience, similar to watching a piece of theatre. Whilst we observe the world changing seamlessly around the narrator, we are not distracted but instead feel more connected to the real people inside this snow globe world. Sometimes it’s hard not to believe that if not for a thin barrier (like the gulf between the front-row of seating and the stage), we could reach out and touch them.

“There

is something about war that almost all war films lack – the aftermath. ”

War films are a dime a dozen, so much so that even individual wars are now their own genre of film. There is a distinction between World War II films, Vietnam Films, the wars of old, and even fictional conflict. I am a big fan of war films; my favorites are the ones with the best photography of conflict – All Quiet on the Western Front, Paths of Glory, Apocalypse Now and The Thin Red Line - to name but a few. These films aim to instill the same fear and despair in the audience that is felt by soldiers during battle. As a history student, I am a big fan of war films that recount stories, such as Joyeaux Noel, Downfall, and Gallipoli. Although dramatised, they offer insight into the events in a way that differs from regular sources. I also love war films set in real wars, but are complete works of fiction designed to tell a good story, such as Inglourious Basterds and Dr. Strangelove. However, there is something about war that almost all war films lack – the aftermath. All men, in some way, return home from war changed. Some take to alcohol, some grow disaffected from their families, others have to learn to deal with new disabilities. The Best Years of Our Lives is a film that deals with all of these issues. Set and released one year after World War II, William Wyler’s Best Picture winning film tells the story of three men who come home from war as men who appear the same but are fundamentally different. There is the sailor, now with hooks for hands, who tries to adjust to a staring family; there is the Sergeant, who grows distant from his family and work, takes up drinking as his form of comfort; and there is the captain, jobless and haunted by war fatigue, watching as his once vibrant marriage turns loveless. Each of them has to readjust to their new lives, attempting to help each other out on the way. After wading through dead bodies, some close friends, some their own kills, how could they simply go back to normal? For 1946, the film was a

Malcolm Coates

zeitgeist for the generation, but the film’s theme is timeless for any war. Thirty years later, former soldiers were getting over another war, this time Vietnam, and another such film was made. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver explores Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, although it barely ever mentions the actual war. Travis Bickle, the film’s anti-hero, is lonely and depressed. We see his body slightly damaged and his mind completely shattered by the war. We know nothing of his service, except that he was a marine and that he was wounded. Yet we get the sense that he must have been through hell to come out as confused and misanthropic as he does. Taxi Driver deals with the issue more subtly than The Best Years of Our Lives, but there is no doubting that war’s aftermath is the real theme for both films. There are a few other examples, but they are often more heavy handed. We see Tommy Lee Jones’s character die from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Hell. Bruce Dern and Christopher Walken’s characters also choose suicide rather than continue to live with the horrors of what they saw in Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, respectively. Rambo launches a one-man war at the slightest provocation from Washington police officers – the list could go on, but the point is, the horrors returning veterans face is seldom treated as honestly or as thoroughly as it was in The Best Years of Our Lives or Taxi Driver. It is an issue that is harder for filmmakers to deal with than war itself. Whilst war is hell, it is also relevant for every generation and historically has captured our collective imaginations. Everyone has a friend or a relative who has served, and most of the time feels proud of his or her service. The transition home is, in many ways, just as hard on the soldiers, but much less glorious. However, the few films that have been made on the subject are in every way as important to the genre as any other war film.

Haddasi Reuben - Mother Nature

Time Tyer Sukie Baker Have you ever noticed that time and space are the same thing? When you are enjoying a long walk, the distance flies by. If you’re trudging through the pouring rain and just want to get home to that leftover pizza you’ve classed as the highlight of a very dull day, metres grow into miles. It’s the same with time; everyone knows that time flies when you’re having fun. Everyone knows that it drags in the mud like a broken tail when you’re miserable. It’s an accepted part of life, yet most people treat time as if it’s just a ruler marking the seconds, hours, days and years. Time is not objective – that’s what makes doing the thing that I do so hard. I’m a Time Tyer. You aren’t meant to know about me, but I never really play by the rules. I was born in 1860, or thereabouts. I am the Time Tyer, undoing your wrongs, helping you with every hour you need rewinding - every moment you regret, every word you wish you could take back. Tying up time is exactly what it sounds like; tedious and occasionally dangerous. If I nip or tuck too much, if I allow a cut to tear, the void gets in and starts swallowing time indiscriminately. Time is a fabric, like any other. It can be torn, worn thin or punctured; it’s a little like working with black holes, I’d imagine. Space doesn’t exist in the way you might think it does, it’s just a reflection of time; not an entity in itself. Technically, black holes are where a tear causes time to unravel so that it begins to affect everything around it, to the point where even you would have trouble ignoring it. Normally, a tear erases a few hundred people from ever having existed, springs a few more in their place and occasionally wipes out chunks of landscape from the picture. Black holes are just bigger and further away. Can I interest you in a bit of unstitching? Maybe I can change the timing that caused your cat to get hit by a car, hmm? Or tear that nasty little man out of existence for you? No? Well if you’re sure… If you change your mind, here’s my card. Chances are you’ll catch me sometime; I’m always around.

. 14

Interview With Young Filmmaker Sam Boullier Matt Conn

I had a chat with York film student Sam Boullier just before he began shooting on his first short.

So Sam, give us a brief overview of the story. There’s a very short timescale, just one night and the following morning. It cuts in to a couple driving in a car just after they’ve robbed a bank or shop. During the robbery a child has been accidentally killed. Details are never disclosed, the only evidence is that the couple are driving away with money in a bag and they’re scared. The final running time will be about fifteen minutes and there’s almost no dialogue in the film at all.

Tell me a bit about the setting of the film. The film isn’t set in any particular time but it’s definitely not the present. It has a fairy-tale sort of quality; it’s in the past but not the actual past. The age of the characters is ambiguous, as long as they’re believable as a couple on screen, it doesn’t really matter.

“The

What is the central theme that you’re trying to get across?

Every scene apart from the party is minimalistic, one or two shots per scene, but the party is going to be this huge montage; it’s also going to be the trickiest to shoot.

What I’m trying to get across in this film is that this event is the turning point of the female character’s life, the realisation that her actions really do have consequences. It sounds deep and meaningful but it’s a realisation that I think we all come to at some point in our lives.

“Using weird imagery to show a character losing their grip on reality ” What other things have influenced you?

There’s definitely some Quentin Tarantino in

there, especially the idea of timelessness. Pulp Fiction for instance, is such a quintessential 90s movie but then it could just as easily be the 70s or 80s, you never see a CD player, everything is retro. It’s a fantasy world. Probably the film that has most influenced what I’m trying to do is Terrence Malik’s Badlands, particularly the atmosphere of that movie and the way image relates to sound. Also In Bruges, where a central character has to deal with the guilt of a terrible accident, although my film doesn’t have the hilarious pay off! Black Swan and Don’t Look Now too, in terms of using weird imagery to show a character losing their grip on reality and visual representations of a character haunted by their mind. For a lot of the film, it’s ambiguous whether the female character’s guilt is somehow distorting what’s really happening.

90s rave scene has definitely rubbed off on me.”

A major scene in the film is the party scene, tell me how it fits in.

I’m really interested in using iconography to develop characterisation. For instance, if a character had their eye gouged out and then they have an eye patch, that’s just a natural product of what you see, but if we first see a character wearing an eye patch, that immediately creates a mystery about their backstory. So in the party scene there might be someone only wearing denim, or dressed like a Native American. I don’t want it to look too clean like a costume party; the costumes can be wild whilst still feeling organic. The 90s rave scene has definite-

ly rubbed off on me, where you see people wandering around wearing all sorts of weird things but it’s perfectly natural within the context. There is a backdrop of happy people, because it’s about the death of childhood and innocence. The female character feels incredibly alone, as she’s the only one who has to deal with the consequences. She both identifies herself with the revellers and also all the bad stuff that’s happened.

What’s the film called? The working title is Pretty Daze, which is ripped off the new Kurt Vile album! I’ve struggled to find a title but I’ve got a page with loads of different words on it that I like. Pretty Daze is quite delicate and says a lot about what I want the tone of the film to be.

“A tribal, earthy feel similar

in a way to the haunting xylophone in Badlands”

How do you plan to use music to create a sense of this unreal past? There are a few options, one of which is this band from London who play sort of weird shoegaze jazz. They don’t have any music out because they’re just a jam band so they’d give the film a really distinctive sound, but I’m not sure if it’ll work yet. I’m also talking to a steel pan player, which would give it a tribal, earthy feel similar in a way to the haunting xylophone in Badlands. In the party scene, the music isn’t going to be rave or party music at all. I’m not going to say too much about why because I want it left open to interpretation.

Selina Pope - Fashionista

Stockholm Winters Elizabeth Mail e - Phoenix

Brother, Do you remember the endless Stockholm winters? My shoes have forgotten the shivers from snow. I have grown up, I have grown sad. The kind of sad that takes you over and makes you stay underwater just a little too long. But brother, I have grown old, in this grey English town, Where oceans swallow my childhood cold.

. Roosa Päivänsalo

“Nostalgia of the universal and unique soul orbiting around the Sun and stars, Phoenix appears in the waves of dawn and burns in the dust of darkness.” 19

Interview With Pamela Hartshorne Elinore Court and Holly Ranfield

“When we think about the past,

how present is it?”

In your novel Time’s Echo, were time and nostalgia important themes as you were writing? I wouldn’t say nostalgia, but time is definitely key to the book. I thought about time a lot. When we think about the past, how present is it? I started with the idea of Post Traumatic Stress disorder, as one of the symptoms of the illness is that you literally re-experience the traumatic incident. There might be a sound or smell that not only triggers the memory but forces you to re-experience it. I started with the idea that if you can re-experience something in your past in such a vivid way, what if you could go back a bit farther? There is always that ‘what if ’ question - what if you could go back and see what it was really like? What if you could change it? I’m always fascinated by that idea. Is the motif about water and drowning in your novel about memories and the past overwhelming the characters in the present? I think that’s a really nice way of putting it. There’s something unstoppable about the past. There are so many times when you want to stop time and say ‘let it be 30 seconds before, let me not have fallen over or answered this phone call that gave me bad news’ but you never can. Time keeps on going and taking you with it whether you want it to or not.

“We idealise the past because it’s

a safe place - it’s safe because we know it.”

Do you think it’s easy to idealise our past or a past we’ve never experienced? Certainly, we’re self-selective. Some people choose to remember the bad things, but if you’re a romantic, you only remember the good. When I look through photos, every day was a sunny day and

everyone was always smiling, it appears as if it were some kind of continuous golden age looking back, but it clearly wasn’t. Those were just the times I chose to take photos. I think we idealise the past because it’s a safe place - it’s safe because we know it, we have no idea what will happen in the future and this uncertainty is what worries us. The past has that security. Would you say that time is subjective? The whole notion of perception is interesting. I did my thesis on space. Part of that was on how we perceive time. For example, when you’re broken-hearted, the days feel like they go on forever, whereas when you’re feeling bright and upbeat time goes really quickly. There are times when we’re on autopilot and we lose sense of time. You could be driving along the motorway and suddenly realise you’re speeding, but your mind was in autopilot. It’s instances like these that cause us to reassess our understanding of time passing. There can never be one complete truth about perception; we can’t say, ‘this moment in time was like this’. The three of us sitting here will be experiencing this moment in time differently; we will remember it differently too. Do you think reading novels can be a form of time travel? Yes. When you read, you are entering a different world in your imagination. My task as a writer is to create that. In my novel, I’m not saying ‘that’s what Elizabethan England was like’ because I don’t really know. It’s the world I’ve created because that’s what I think it would have been like. I’m inviting the reader to step into that world. I have to try and convince you and if you are convinced, the novel is a success. People read historical novels for the enjoyment of the differences between that world and their reality but at the same time, you need aspects of sameness to connect with the reader. We time-travel within the confines of our mind and imagination.

Hadassi Reuben - Bird

Hadassi Reuben - Joseph Light

Capturing Traditon Janet Gammans

Anna Gammans

Art - Stripped To Its Roots

The 49th Composition Artist - Doina Tautu Author - Katherine Caddy

The 49th Composition Doina Tautu Forest Awakening Craig Elliot Ophelia Hadassi Reuben The New Swan Vanessa Lloyd Retour San Oubli Irina & Silviu Szekely

Art Commentator Katherine Caddy

Tautu’s piece combines vibrant colours with composite, intangible forms influenced by Abstract painting of the twentieth century. The work departs from reality yet grounds us within it through its appeal to the human form. The forms are flattened and abstracted, their scale estranged from reality. Yet, Tautu’s work hovers within this world through the figural representations that form intricate patterns across the canvas. This work is loosely reminiscent of the work of Picasso, particularly his early Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which explores the notion of multi-faceted forms. In a similar way, Tautu’s bodies are distorted and stretched to push further the visual representations of human experience.

Forest Awakening

Ophelia

Artist - Craig Elliot Author - Katherine Caddy

Author- Katherine Caddy

Reuben engages with concerns of the celestial and timelessness - addressed by Romanticism. The photograph can be said to reference early photography in which people were captured sleeping or dead, clothed in lace, reminiscent of Russian post-mortem photography and works exploring domestic idylls. This is a nostalgic and mysterious black and white piece that expresses a sense of stillness and quietude. Its title encourages remembrance of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, leading to thoughts of the Lady of Shallot.

Elliott’s work, deeply rooted within twentieth century High Fantasy illustration, uses the latest technology to create delicate and ethereal imagery. Elliott’s work creates a sense of being within a dream world; lingering comfortably between reality and the intangible. The image is, to a degree, distanced from stresses of reality and time constraints; the lady lies amongst richly coloured fauna with the sun shining on her face. In this way, the work explores aspects of the Romantic as well as clear references to the British pre-Raphaelite movement. Artist - Hadassi

Reuben

The New Swan Author & Artist - Vanessa Lloyd

Retour Sans Oubli Author - Katherine Caddy

This painting references Ingresâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mademoiselle Caroline RiviĂ¨re in its composition, using Collage to modernise late eighteenth century portraiture. Ingresâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Caroline is taken out of context, placed within a golden field, losing her identity through the placement of the black hat across her face. Issues of familiarisation, authorship and artistic intent are of interest here, as the original portrait is abstracted and removed from its initial location. Influenced by Photomontage, the artist creates a composite image through the layering of several sources. Removing the sitter from their original environment encourages the viewer to contemplate them in a new way. We are forced to see an amalgamation of historical artist genres in a modern way.

Textile design is an ancient art form and one that still deserves consideration. It started in China with woodblock printing - a painstaking technique carried out by hand. Nowadays, designs can be printed on a huge scale using rotary screen and digital printers. Regardless of how easy technical advances make it to design and print fabric, it is inevitable that huge amounts of planning will have gone into most of the patterned fabrics you see around you. Each design must be scrutinised to check if there are any distracting gaps in the pattern and sometimes months of careful research goes into choosing the combination of colours finally used. Perhaps it is time to properly appreciate the designer who is all-to-often under-appreciated. 30

Artist - Irina & Silviu Szekely 31

Issue 3

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