Rosie Eveleigh’s risograph illustrations are a little bit special, are works of art that I’d love to have hanging on my wall. Her series ‘ Nausea’, based on the book by Existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre – that concerns a dejected historian who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, thus evoking a sense of nausea – is a conceptually beautiful.
She defines her work as being a search for the space between abstraction and representation, compositions that leave space open to interpretation as literature and poetry do. Her process is all about creating drawings on a spatial plane using typographic and design grid systems. It is about the play between the confines and conventions of grid structures and then marrying them with the forms that break them.
This set of risographs are made from component layers, a series of colours and forms layering and finding images in repetition, which Eveleigh has presented along with an excerpt from ‘Nausea:
My gaze travels slowly and wearily down over this forehead, these cheeks: it meets nothing firm, and sinks into the sand. Admittedly there is a nose there, two eyes and a mouth, but none of that has any significance, nor even human expression.
Here’s what she has to say about the series:
I am interested in cutting back to reveal a new image underneath, where something happens you didn’t or couldn’t expect. When you first encounter a medium you’re not entirely sure of, sometimes that empty knowledge inquisitiveness can work in a surprising way – sometimes not. The isolated features – a nostril hair, an eye, the suggestion of ear, the way that Roquentin stares at himself in the mirror, pushing his nose right to the glass, until his features become strange and unreal.
I wish there were more risographs to show you but this is it. It’s all there is. However, she does have other work on her site that’s well worth a look.