By Claire Scully (Avery Hill)
ISBN: 978-1-910395-74-5- (HB)
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Know Your Place… 9/10
The most wondrous thing about comics is their sheer versality. In terms of narrative, exposition, mood-setting and information dissemination, nothing comes close, and the range of visualisations span near-abstract construction to hyper-realism. If the end-consumer is particularly receptive, the author can even dial back on narrative or plot or characterisation and let a succession of carefully-applied images make a story unique to each reader. It’s like jazz for your head and before your very eyes…
In all the most telling ways, we’re still monkeys clinging to rocks: we can’t help but respond viscerally to our environment: cowed or elated by stony heights, drawn to and pacified by pools and gardens, inexplicably moved to fear or joy by forests. It’s in our blood and bones: nobody stands on a mountaintop or looks down into the Grand Canyon and says “meh”…
Wherever we are, the landscapes in our heads still unfold before or curl back on us. We may have left the caves and trees and sunlit shores, but we now mimic those ancient sanctuary havens in our dwellings. We climb high and burrow deep and our architecture has visceral, compulsive, instinctive power over us.
Walk by a Victorian school, across a Roman viaduct or study the oppressive, aggressive triumphalism of Nazi-built buildings or battle emplacements – we’re all still part of the wild with Nature in our veins and bones. Just don’t stand too long near towering desert mile-spires or vertical palaces based on knickknacks or vegetables or sex-toys…
When someone really talented and truly invested channels such primal responses, the fires of creativity can push right into the hindbrain to our inner primitive. The Wilderness Collection does that. A timely amalgamation of three earlier rambles through realities – Internal Wilderness, Desolation Wilderness and Outer Wilderness – the sequenced images comprise a hardback handbook of purely and sublimely visual triggers: experiences enhanced by the rough tactile textures of the card they are printed on. This is the culmination of a project examining the relationship between Landscape and Memory.
The first steps come in nocturnal shades of blue as Internal Wilderness presents “a journal of a sequence of events occurring over a period of time and location in space” before the ceaseless peregrination reaches the warm reds, oranges, browns and fading greens of the Desolation Wilderness which depicts “a sequence of events occurring over a period of time in the search for a location in space”.
Careful now, you are nearing a stopping point if not an end, as Outer Wilderness explores the wildest places on the route: “a sequence of events occurring over an unimaginable period of time in the vastness of space” – melding animal, mineral and vegetable in a manner reminiscent of Basil Wolverton in his visionary, inspirational element….
Creator Claire Scully has inscribed and sequenced compelling scenes of rocks and trees and waters and skies and other things less definable, across different seasons and times of day in such a fashion that you must look and pause and ponder.
This is a graphic missile targeting recollection and imagination; one that hits with serenely devastating impact.
If you are still human or at least a primate looking for challenge, this will make you think: you won’t be able to help yourself…
© 2019 Claire Scully. All rights reserved.