Metafiction, Myth and Language: A World in Words (and Pictures)

Looking back over some of the modernist poetry we studied in Semester 1's Humanities class, I've continued to apply more radical visual structures to the poetic text, using words and their placement as a means of enforcing certain feelings or concepts for the reader: for example, during an earlier scene where the main character struggles up the rocky path to her home at a pivotal moment, separating each word describing the journey onto a line, spaced out from the previous, and following, words to suggest a tricky series of steps (compounds and phrases such as 'rock-tripped', 'thorn-pricked', 'branch-beaten' enforcing the difficulty of the climb). And, in the climactic battle - the main emotional thrust of which is not the overall victory of the allies, or the defeat of the tyrant king and queen - but the loss of the main character's best friend, the effect of which reaches its pinnacle in the third page below, signifying almost unbearable isolation a

 A few days of essential family business later, and I was able to return to the question of space and placement of visual components in the text over the weekend. I've now inked up and digitized all of the original sketches and visual ideas I had for possible wood and stone carvings. Below are a few of them, some turned into border and banner designs, making nearly 20 in all (including cleaned-up versions of the designs used in the stone carvings).  What's quite nteresting is the lack of several notable characters or character-types - no humans are depicted (apart from Gerthild, who is a bit of a special case). This might have been simply due to my interest in figuring out, and representing, the unfamiliar - i.e., the genuine Others - who appear in the story: most readers could visualise what a wizard or a king might look like, but nobody has ever seen, until now, a depiction of a Rockcat or Ulfish person. Only 4 of the 6 (prime) deities have (so far) been drawn, although the

 Today's tutorial went well, focusing mainly on space - both physical and visual, in the 'museum'/exhibition layout, and in the text itself, which is now in the final editing and presentation stage. We discussed the nature of traditional museums and how they tend to put the visitor through a planned timeline of experience - navigating different places and spaces - circular and/or linear. This came back to my sketchy idea of enforcing some kind of cyclical physicality upon the visitor to my space - bringing them back to the beginning (cf. the ouroborus snake design, again). Seeing strong examples of what can be done with art books and layout had influenced my thoughts on using more white space in the book/text (and reflecting this in the physical museum layout) - by adding blank pages, or creating extra spaces between lines and words at crucial points in the narrative, and interpolating the drawings of characters not as illustrations but as 'break points', for exampl