Can a book tell a story without words? Or do we need the words in order to call it a book? During my experimentation I decided to let the physical book take you on the journey of someone who’s becoming obsessive.
I know we’re all told “don’t judge a book by its cover” and still we cannot help but do so. Similar to a child we tend to have a more idealistic view about our own choices, e.g. smoking, so why do we start? Like the child we’re attracted to the bright, the colourful and “cool” things which often includes peer pressure and wrong choices. This is why the cover of my book has been drawn in a more child like manor, misleading us to what comes next.
Once you start on your obsessive habitual behaviour you know it’ll get worse but you still go on. In order to represent this within my book I made my pages as noisy as I could, the further you go the more noise the pages make when you turn them. In order to do so I poured water over pages and dried them, I scrunched up some pages and glued others together so the book really rustles as you turn the pages.
Not only does the book get physically noisier but it also gets more visibly chaotic. Much like any obsession The further you go the worse it gets, it starts to consume and destroy.
In the end it will tear whole chunks out of a person and leave scars and bruises… I wanted the book to show this so I ripped out pages, tore others apart, as well as (under my flatmates’ supervision) burned holes into random pages. Singed and burned others and made paint splatters and scribbled on the pages and edges, especially towards the end of the book.
