Announcing a New Project: Every Thing That Lives Is Holy

Artist Kain White and myself are working on the latest Harebrained project: an accordion book featuring poetry and letter excerpts from the English poet, artist and visionary, William Blake. Both Kain and myself draw great inspiration from Blake’s work, life, and thought, so we are excited to celebrate and share his vision with you. 

In this homage to his cosmology—his understanding of the universe—Kain is responding to Blake’s words with his own unique artistic interpretation. I’ll be hand setting, printing and binding the work into a new Harebrained limited edition.

While we will be drawing on Blake’s aesthetics in some of the design elements—his colour palette, typography, and strong use of line—the book is intended not as an imitation, but as a conversation with Blake’s words, to which we’ll bring our own creative vision. 

We are excited to have obtained permissions for the work, and have just finished our very first page spread—the first of nine, making up a total of sixteen pages and two endpapers. We’re delighted to share our first pictures with you. 

This excerpt is from Blake’s poem, ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’. While Blake placed these lines at the end of his poem, as its culmination, we have chosen to display them at our book’s beginning as a joyous declaration of its theme.

The text and images are printed on Japanese Awagami kozo, made from the bark of the paper mulberry tree. It is known for its superior surface in printmaking, and also its translucence, which has allowed us to create the cloud effect by printing on the back of the sheet, so that the shadow print shows through.

Kain has chosen to introduce Blake’s vision with a grey nestling, representing vulnerability and the potential that is realised in the bird’s fully-fledged brilliance. Our process for this spread has meant that each sheet passed through one of our two printing presses a total of six times. You can see part of its creation in the video below.