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Cover and page images produced for an artist book part of the Advanced printmaking course at City lit in 2020/2021. The cover is perspex and was baked in the oven to produce bubbles. The binding is plastic tubing mimicking the tubing from a spacesuit.

The book is a combination of a number of different print techniques. The cover is a photo litho image. Within the book there are silkscreen prints, cyanotypes, etched lino prints overprinted with wooden type. The quotes are printed on a gel plate.

The book is Inspired by a novel, Solaris written by Stanislaw Lem and the 1972 Russian film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. The story is about a psychologist Kris Kelvin, who arrives at a space station to investigate what is happening to a group of scientists who are conducting scientific experiments using radiation, on the planet Solaris. The crew are being haunted by hallucinations or apparations from their former lives and imagination.

“Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.”

From Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

Shortly after Kris arrives on the space station he begins to have visitations and sees a copy of his wife Rheya. Rheya had previously committed suicide after Kris had left her. Kris believes at first that he is dreaming but after the other crew members can aslo see his wife he realises she is actually there.

I was particularly interested in this story as it’s a continuation on a theme I started to work on last year about memory and hallucination. Do we ever lose people close to us when they pass away or are they always with us embedded in our consciousness?

An object, place, moment in time, a fragment of music or bird call can bring back a memory or thought about the person who isn’t with us anymore. The person need not be dead for a sensory stimulation to create a visitation of their being in our minds. It’s a yearning to be with the loved person, to hear them speak to touch them and share a joke with them again. 

“We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.”

From Solaris by Stanislaw Lem