Folding books made from drawings on a 24 hour train journey

The format of the Chinese folding book was used as an episodic journey through the landscape - this linked with a Eurostar journey which provided the opportunity to make a series of quickfire drawings of open landscapes and those peripheral spaces between cities.

The speed of travel made incidents segue and overlap, as the landscape unfolded in time and space; so the drawings relied on quick 180° horizontal scans, abbreviation and lightness of touch. Sitting on the train I also knew the feeling of driving in the dark, on the motorway at night, seeing the lines of headlights and flashes of hidden outbuildings.

The journeys encompass landscapes dissected by motorways and out of town shopping centres. Familiar places on the edge of town, where the ubiquity of certain shapes and forms make the town nameless. The spaces in the paintings are seen more as though you are floating over them rather than being grounded in them - they become dreamscapes with a distance from the anxiety induced by this monoculture - as they are glimpsed from the enclosed capsule of the train rushing through the landscape.

 
 

The folding books I used were brought to Mary Husted by Joe Zhu from China, as part of Open Books