or edwinmorris.net

This is a project that I thought I had finished way back in the nineties, a smaller than A5 booklet which I exhibited twice, once at the Pump House Gallery and once somewhere in (I think) Milton Keynes. The booklet was placed in a wall-mounted acrylic pamphlet holder, the intention being to disguise it as any other piece of bumf that you might stumble across in a gallery/museum and pick up and read some time later when you discover it again, slightly crumpled, stashed away in a rarely used coat pocket.

The subject of the booklet is death. Death, loss and absence. Each page describing the death of someone in the town where I grew up (a small Welsh town, hence the title). Some of the people I knew, some of the people I was close to but others I was only made aware of as they became characters in playground stories; ‘Hear about H? Topped himself with a shotgun’. This would be followed by the miming of placing a gun barrel in your mouth.

The booklet proved a hit with my old school friends, every now and then I would be told about another more recent death or someone I had missed out of the original text.

For years I have wanted to remake the work. I wanted to hone some of the language and include some images. In my head it became a book, hard-back, printed on heavy art paper with beautiful typography and accompanied by photographs of the various spots that these people died but somehow the thought of printing a book (which inevitably incurs cost and thus the necessity to recoup that cost by selling it) just seemed wrong.

So I have decided on a series of framed prints. Each print a page of the work, including a photograph which I went back to Wales to take. The print includes various printer marks which somehow seem to me to leave the work in some sort of ambiguous state, documents of a text ready to be published but instead hanging on a wall behind glass.

Recreating the work led me down a an unexpected path, that of the arcane world of Josef Müller-Brockmann’s typographical grid system. I have always been attracted to minimalism in art but have been blissfully unaware that the process of minimal graphic design has its own set of ‘rules’ created (or defined) by Müller-Brockmann. When typesetting the original green green grass booklet I did everything by eye, moving a letter a few pixels to the left etc until everything just felt ‘right’. Little did I know that a process exists that I could have followed to achieve the perfection that I was looking for.

I then discovered the calculations of Marcus Gärde who handily put on the internet fairly easy to follow guidelines about how to create a guideline grid in Adobe’s inDesign that matches your chosen paper and font size. I spent a few evenings following the instructions, laying out the various elements on to the underlying grid but I just couldn’t help myself shifting things about a fraction at a time. I guess I still have the habits of someone taught by that generation of the 60s and 70s where instinct is preferred to any sort of system of rules.

I’ve dug out this gem from one of my hard drives, an embarrassing and pretentious attempt at textual playfulness. It’s a painstaking reconstruction of a book cover by Rodney Graham which is itself a reconstruction of another book (the details of which escape me as it’s sitting in a box somewhere in my house), adapted to try to convey something about the moribund state of my creative imagination.

Although the intention was pure enough it was only after I had finished the piece and looked at it again after a week or two that I realised how painfully cringeworthy it was. The attempt at communicating ideas about the risible myth of the artist (and the desire to inhabit that myth) became itself risible, I think mainly through the use of my name in place of Rodney’s.

Perhaps I should rework it with a generic name or just an initial like in some novel from the 19th century? Or perhaps I should just leave it sitting shamefully in the corner with its back to the room…

This is a project I have been working on for a while, collecting stills of sunsets from 60s/70s counterculture and dystopian films. It’s a sort of revery on the notion of the sunset as a punctuation or a vignette of the enlightenment sublime inserted in to a dark vision of modernity, a moment of calm or a sign pointing to a suggestion of a happier future.

It’s a result of a train of thought that started in notions of hubris, in particular the hubris of the 60s generation; the ’68ers’ and their utopian violence, the hippies and their arcadian retreat from the world; and ends somewhere near John Gray’s denouncing of progress as dangerous subterfuge.

The photographs are about A4 size, all experiments with enlargement failed dismally.