Douglas Dodds
He sat at the table and decided what he wanted to write for the NEXUS degree show brochure.
‘My path towards becoming an artist is summarised by’… by what? He thought about it for a while, but couldn’t think how to end the sentence, so highlighted it and deleted it.
‘What defines great art’ … no, far too pretentious, how about ‘A defining factor of my art practice is’ … again, he was lost as what to write.
He sat back and thought about it. What did he actually do?
The simplest way to say what he did would be to say that he made paper sculptures, and told stories about Vikings. He was a writer, working on retelling ancient Icelandic sagas for modern audiences, having created Onund’s Saga, an illustrated story based upon the first few chapters of the saga of Grettir the Strong. He was also working on a compilation of short stories based on Norse mythology, centering on Norse cosmology and the mythical tree Yggdrasil. He was also an illustrator, piecing together various 3D modeling techniques in order to create miniature scenes and figures out of cut and folded paper.
That was the physical stuff he did, but he also was fascinated with the idea of perception. He liked creating work that forced the viewer to move around to experience it as a whole, or to read the same events though different character eyes. He liked the idea of not giving the readers/ viewers of his creations all the information but letting them work it out for themselves.
He was also an avid baker.
Then it struck him. ‘That was it!’ he thought, ‘that was perfect, just the right amount of pretentious, I’ll just’… his hands hovered over the keyboard… ‘How did it start again?’
