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Together with original drawings and linocut prints, Nick Morley presents The Lion and The Ox and The Boar and The Bear, the first KALEID editions publication hand-printed on an Adana Press in the project space itself. Exploring the many forms of mankind and man’s struggle to understand his place in the world, Morley appropriates images from mainstream media, paring down and reformalising these selections to offer new meanings, shifting perceived rules and guidelines.
In The Lion and The Ox and The Boar and The Bear, Morley pushes his play with moral guidance further, creating work in response to Aesop’s lesser known fables. These fables, over time, have lost their intended lesson, used to advantage by Morley whose reworking goes so far as to alter the original animals and their prescribed activities. The imbricating layers of the fan-format piece when set in motion produce new word and image juxtapositions, or nonsense hybrids.
Edition of five hundred, priced at £15.00 each.
The Lion and The Ox and The Boar and The Bear Artist’s book publication. Adana hand-printed edition 2009, £15
Two Boys Graphite pencil on paper 2009
Ice Man Graphite pencil on paper 2009
Rock Man Graphite pencil on paper 2009
Safari Graphite pencil on paper 2009
Friends Colour pencil on paper 2009
Okapi Colour pencil on paper 2009
Leopard Man Lino print on paper 2009
Tortoise Boy Lino print on paper 2009
Big Bunny Lino print on paper 2007
Zebra Man Lino print on paper 2009
Photograph Alessandra Chilá
Safari Graphite pencil on paper 2009
FLASH Review Redchurch Idler
If Nietzsche’s observation in The Birth of Tragedy that the novel was
an ‘infinitely enhanced Aesopian fable’
remains true, then Nick Morley’s
new publication might be viewed as
not only a shuffling of age old texts
but a challenge for the contemporary novel also.
Printed on a bench top ‘Adana 85’,
and held together by cylinder posts,
the book’s user is invited to participate
in an act of ongoing recombinance,
generating via the fan-format,
pantomime animals that threaten zoological taxonomy,
and textual disjunctions which thwart the desire
for a familiar or happy ending;
unkind nursery stories so to speak.
