Songs and the Soil

The publication was designed to coincide with Mark Garry’s exhibition entitled, Songs and the Soil which was hosted at the Metropolitan Arts centre, Belfast, 2020. The exhibition engages with the subjects of  landscape and music/sound—exploring each element from historical, social and culturally associative perspectives; where landscape is recognised as a fluid term articulating physical space, idealised space and social space that reflects a convergence of physical processes and cultural meaning, and where song act as a response to, or archive, of personal, historical or socio-political instances. The collaborative project integrates texts by Mark Garry, John Graham, Joanne Laws, Sharon Phelan, Suzanne Walsh, a transcription of a radio interview from 1974 with Charles Amirkhanian and the musician Robbie Basho and a script from Mark Garry's film An Lucht Siúil.

The selected images in the publication act as visual echoes of the artist’s creative motivations, intended to complement the textual contributions, functioning as a platform to extend discourse of themes and topics embedded within the research. The design solution elicits direction from the synthesis of topics articulated within the contributors’ texts to create a composition that considers research commonalities and indirect interactions of topics that take place within the artist’s work. 

Super Octavo threadsewn digital print publication.Typeset in Kingfisher, designed by Jeremy Tankard with footnotes set in Univers Condensed designed by Adrian Frutiger. Substrate used in production: Munken Pure 100gsm, Sirio Color 290gsm. Printed at Impress Printing.