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My enthusiasm is shared by British artist Philip Hughes who contacted me in 2016
to ask if we would be interested in another collaboration with him and
Mexican poet and novelist Carmen Boullosa. Of course! Our previous
collaboration was the successful Jump of the Manta Ray.
Alchemy of the Planets has been inspired by the wealth of images from recent
missions to planets and moons within our solar system. These include the
New Horizons mission which in 2015 gave us our very first close-ups of
Pluto, and in 2016 the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Cassini-Huygens
mission to Saturn (soon to end), and the probe Dawn to the dwarf planet Ceres between
the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
Philip Hughes has created
a total of thirty-two works relating to twelve planetary
bodies, derived from images selected from those sent back by planetary missions,
as well as from the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station,
images of distant landscapes that have provided the source inspiration for
paintings, pastels, and digital collages.
Boullosa and Hughes
have collaborated before on two artist’s books in which Hughes illustrated
Boullosa’s poems. This time it is Boullosa who has been inspired by Hughes’s
images, producing two poetic responses, a set of short poems – Pies – and
a further set of longer poems – Cantos. In order to develop more clearly
the association between the pictures of the planets and their moons and the
names attributed to various celestial bodies, she researched into mythology,
beginning by re-reading Hesiod’s Theogony and studying the rituals
attached to their worship as described in his Orphic Hymns. In turn Psiche
Hughes has worked closely with these texts to create an intimate translation.
The Spanish and English texts sit together on the page, facing Philip’s image.
Here is one of
Philip's images, taking its inspiration from materials returned by the 1996
Magellan spacecraft to Venus:
I want the
construction of this book to bring together technology and art, so expect
something a little different from the usual codex! The text will be hand-set in
Hunt Roman and we shall be using heavy Somerset and Arches papers
throughout. Philip's images will be printed here at The Old School Press on our
eight-colour Epson 3800 printer. It will be a small edition.
We are happy to take
expressions of interest now. Further details and prices will be announced in a
future newsletter.
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