Graham Rawle is a collage artist and writer. His latest book, Woman’s World, is a novel created entirely from fragments of text cut out of early 1960s women’s magazines. Meghan read about him in the latest issue of I.D. magazine:
First, Rawle wrote a straightforward novel. Then, Photoshop be damned, he used scissors and glue to clip words and phrases from the magazines. He catalogued the clippings thematically, scrapbook-style, in what amounted to 11 volumes of starter text. Finally, he went back and married the two, translating the original narrative using only the fragments he had collected, so that simple sentences like “What nonsense!” became “That’s all tosh and table margarine.” For Rawle, merging writing and design meant thinking obliquely about both. “Doing collage, you have to make do with what you’ve got,” he says. “When I make pictures, if I can’t find the right hat then I cut up a photo of a tomato.”
This is the kind of thing I want to do with my newspaper blackout comics poems. Outstanding.