TRANSFORMATION - Illuminated Manuscript
For our first in-class assignment, we were asked to create an illustrated manuscript inspired by batik designs. We browsed through a few batik design books to get the INSPIRATION PUMPING(!!!!!!1!one) and set out to do it.
I started by writing whatever was in my head at that moment. Really, there was no method to it, just an endless train of words and images and lines. Is there a connection between free writing and the unconscious? Here's what I wrote:
At the edge of the line was a world and at the edge of the world was a little boy who stood at the precipice, he looked at the edge of the world and felt lost, he looked at what was in it and felt lonely. So he stood there, unmoving, a little wisp of life that no one ever saw because he let no one see. But he liked it that way, liked being at a place where no one saw him. So let them play, he thought, let them sing and laugh and cry and die, and he would be separate from it all. So tell me why people die, and babies cry, and people who inspire hate act in good faith. And people ask him why he does it, but he doesn't know either. The little boy walks, a wanderer at his own right; contemplative and quiet and not dead. Don't let me die, he said to himself, and don't let me stop.
I know, what the eff. But I guess that's surrealism for you---a brush with the unconscious. No shame, people. Hashtag stop unconscious hate. Hashtag surrealism is not dead. Hashtag hashtag.
So what I did, I just developed the designs from the writing. It talks about a boy who lives between worlds, and didn't belong in either of them. I noticed that batik designs stem from organic shapes---animals, plants, clouds. I keep thinking back to this batik-esque carving that hangs on my grandparents' wall. Every time I stay over and look at it, I keep seeing a person with his arms at his sides and he's staring right into my guts. But everyone keeps saying that it's a flower. That's the kind of feel I want to put into this illustrated manuscript---a transformation of creatures, hybrids, mutants, not-quite-a-fish-and-not-quite-a-bird-and-sort-of-human-like-but-not-really.
For example, you'd see a fish, but it has leaves for fins, or a beak, and next to it you'd see a bird with weed for wings. Identity, transformation. Alienated from the rest of the world, just like the boy who stands at the edge of the cliff.
Sometimes I still ask myself, what did I mean by this? What inspired me to write this? Who is the boy?
I think the boy is everyone. It's you, me, them and everyone else. Alienation is a universal truth.
We are birds and fishes and humans and hybrids, and it's okay to stand at the edge of the cliff.