With a Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition; a 1928 Masonic Holy Bible; Emily Dickinson’s Selected Poems & Letters; and a Rand McNally World Atlas Imperial Edition from 1968, I asked the participants–a mix of graphic designers, architects, interior designers, professors, curators, writers–to REWRITE. Using only these with the possibility of the addition of island organic material onto a paper support I gave them for consistency, here are a few examples snapped with my phone from the Friday exhibition in the Sparrow Farm House. More continued to happen.
Maybe the questions that could be raised now are those of reading: how do the texts work together, contrast or underscore a new meaning, what on each page carries the message (what is the message), how does the role of design play in pacing, does one look or read, what about individual repertoires of form… I’ll scan and post all 20 or so soon.
To expand and focus this exercise, I’ll take it to Devon UK DesignInquiry REWRITE V2 in a few weeks and will add the prompt of reading past DesignInquiry topics and then rewrite to update, upend, question or confirm through these books with collage. We’ll see. Ben Van Dyke’s was the first (Oh, some scholar! Oh, some sailor!) He read the Bible all afternoon and began the new ruleset of organic material as palimpsest only. — Margo Halverson, 2018
