A long, long time ago the incredible artist and human being that is Alison Sampson invited Leah and I to take part in her Think of a City project. If you haven’t already heard of ToaC then, in a way, you’re pretty lucky because you have an awful lot of amazing artwork waiting for you at thinkofacity.tumblr.com and its companion blog thinkofacityblog.tumblr.com.
What exactly is Think of a City then?
The City is our story- but what is a city?
Part serious architectural investigation, part international art collaboration, for fun, for eventual exhibition, to work together, to see what happens, Think of a City is a mass storytelling project. Join us on a Dérive to experience this city of the imagination, told page by page, by storytellers from around the world.
We’ll take in the multiple scales and facets of urban life to build a communal tale.
Our project is an opportunity for creators to bring the background to the forefront, and to delve into ideas of setting, place, design, geography, politics, architecture, materiality, mise-en-scène and much more besides, within storytelling. It will take time. Comics provide linear stories, but the urban environment is something different: non linear, multi-layered, complex, communal. We’d like to prove that cities are so much more than cityscapes. Every place has its story and every story has its place, but we can’t tell all the tales in this metropolis. If we have maps, they will be partial. This said, we can take you inside the most private rooms and fly above the rooftops, going from public to private in an instant.
This is something.
We don’t know what will happen, any more than you do, but we each will make our contribution, one after another. Feel free to walk our streets and take a coffee in one of our many cafes. Who knows what you might see, or the strange events you might chance across?
Leah and I were lucky enough to be teamed up with Devaki Neogi and had a ToaC slot booked sometime in the summer of 2015. Stuff got in the way, we dropped the ball, it was the school holidays, there were deadlines, the dog ate my homework. It didn’t happen so this was our second run up at it.
Not knowing exactly who or what image we’d be following on from we decided to cheat a tiny bit and try to come up with our concept a little ahead of time. Leah and I thought a miniature city – maybe peopled by fairies and/or insects might be visible among the branches of a tree. That tree could either be a tree from the previous ToaC image, or else have some elements to tie it into the city of that image. I even did a couple of very rough sketches showing how I thought the idea might work. Honestly though, Devaki came up with something better. Something weirder, and funnier. The title “Sea Elf sees elves” just seemed to fit.
You can see the full image by clicking on the one above (or here) and you can see Devaki’s original landscape version of the image at thinkofacityblog.tumblr.com