No.138
This morning on the roads to the market we crossed paths with twenty-four magpies. Not all of these were in one place, although we did see a group of seven and a group of six. If this seems odd that’s because it was, and I thought to myself if there is such a thing as signs then presumably—surely—this is one. Why do we like so much to draw lines between things, causation and coincidence and really it’s just the world going about the days in its enchanting, seasonal, nonchalant way.
(Vegetables are substantially more reliable than signs, and I don’t think enough people think about this fact.)
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
The most thrilling thing of the last two weeks is that the 21_21 Design Sight exhibition that my work features in opened yesterday. ‘Translations: Understanding Misunderstanding’ has now filled part of the Tokyo gallery-museum and is a very interesting curation, including Google Creative Lab research and the Pei-Ying Lin project ‘Unspeakableness’. It has been the most charming thing to work with the team on this, and it is strange to remember that our initial conversations were in February before the world fell apart/together/apart.
Below is a mockup of the installation, and the photos below this are of the construction team setting up the space. I quite adore this new dimension and movement that has been bestowed upon the words and illustrations, which have lived as pages within Lost in Translation for the last seven years now.
In other work news, I continue to put together thoughts and images and shapes for a book that will hopefully come into being (a hope that feels not unlike the hope that the warmth will return after the winter months) and tie up a couple of freelance projects, including creating podcast artwork for the nicest lady of them all, Jodi Ettenberg, whose soon-to-be podcast will contain I’m sure an almost incomprehensible amount of thoughtfulness.
BOOKS THAT I RETURN TO:
It is not possible to describe very easily the work of John Berger, so for the time being let’s just say that I return to his words, and that they often feel like slipping into a calm, sensical pool while the world continues on like a dark hurricane in July. But his writing is not a tidiness, never a tidiness, because as Rebecca Solnit writes in one of her essays, “You wrap up the world in a tidy package, and thinking can stop.”
From his book And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos:
“This small corner of the landscape—which I had never particularly noticed before—caught my eye and pleased me. Pleased me like a particular face one may see passing in the street, unknown, even unremarkable, but for some reason pleasing because of what it suggests of a life being lived.”
And an hour from 1983 in which Berger and Susan Sontag discuss storytelling, and listen to each other in ways that I’m not sure I have seen before or since.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Intriguing, beautiful, and in some ways unsettling work by French artist Sophie Lécuyer, who came to my attention after a faraway friend sent me a link to one of her etchings.
So what is to happen with the rest of it, sky-grey and rainless and a wind blowing in from the salt-stained bay? Reading, definitely reading, perhaps seeing how far I can walk up the hill before I get tired and want to sit down, perhaps reaching far enough into the tea cupboard that I will find a more interesting option, perhaps trying to overhear secrets being whispered between trees as they watch their leaves fall.
Did you know that the word ‘nonplussed’ is a contronym? A contronym being a word that holds opposite meanings depending on the context, like cleave or dust or peruse.
The end.