Influences

Significant influences over the past year:

The science fiction novel Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban.

For me, the early stages of a project are usually spent engrossed in practical and theoretical research; reading text books, watching documentaries, going to museums and galleries etc. All in pursuit of the mystical creative hook. The elusive trigger that, when found releases a tumble of ideas and associations - usually when it's least expected. Books that have previously hit the spot include Hunger Mountain by David Hinton, The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges and Weight by Jeanette Winterson. I know when it's happening because certain words start to jump off the page, as if I'm seeing a coded message that only I can decipher - it feels as if I'm meant to be reading it. And the very things I've been thinking about, like carbon or wood or meat or the cycle of life present themselves repeatedly within the text. That's exactly what happened with Riddley Walker. Suddenly all of those disparate thoughts were gathered together on the page, describing, in a language mutated and phonetic ,the life of a boy in a post-apocalyptic future - primitive, tribal, bound up in rituals, tangled half truths and twisted fictions, quasi - futuristic and unnatural. The book opened me up like magic and laid before me a landscape of limitless imagined possibilities. Liberated.

This: 'Its where theres all the many nor thyere aint no end to you there aint no place where you begin nor leave off. Mountins of us valleys of us far far lans and countrys of us. Tits and belly it wud take you days to walk acrost. Girt roun bums and arms and legs all jynt big and long and long and girt jynt man and woman parts all mullerplyiing back to gether all what ben de vydit. No more oansome in the gathering.' Riddley Walker, p.94