As part of my EnterArts Business for Artists course, I
took part in an End-of-Course exhibition at The Learning Quarter, Wolverhampton.
The exhibition, which was my first, ran from February 9th to 20th, 2004. It was hard, yet rewarding work.
I also took the opportunity to sell copies
of Darwin Is My Co-Pilot and Hondle:
Special Edition at the Open Evening for the exhibition, on the 9th of
February. The event was well attended, and the comics sold quite well. Most of
the attendees went home with at least one of the free comics, and I managed to
sell more than a dozen books. I was genuinely surprised at how much attention
the installation got: perhaps people are more receptive to the idea of Comics
than conventional wisdom would suggest.
I produced three posters for the exhibition:
a short biographical essay, a look at why I chose Comics as a medium, and a
poster outlining my reasons for taking the EnterArts course. The text for each
poster appears below.
MATTHEW CRAIG
Raised
from a larva by Bolivian circus folk, the boy who would become Matthew Craig
first experimented with hard science, soft women and watery houmous at the
Universities of Manchester, Sheffield, UMIST and Leicester.
Having
outstayed his welcome in academia (having been caught drinking tea on
Newsnight), Matthew Craig then decamped to the small wetland town of
Cambridge, where he pursued the dual careers of Research Assistant on the
Human Genome Project and Town Cryer.
Ejected
from Cambridge for being just a little bit too weepy, Matthew Craig drifted
for a while, until he was dragged from the river by a small brown dog.
Delirious, and mistaking the dog�s pleurisy for Angelic Proclamation,
Matthew Craig sat up, passed out, sat up, passed out, and determined to have a
little lie down before becoming a Vehicle for Great Stories. Until he failed
his MOT.
Undaunted
by any of this, Matthew Craig Writes Things, and can be read at the following
websites: The
Matthew Craig Dot Com, Robot
FIST! and Working
Title Comics.
WHY
COMICS?
I've
been reading comics since before I could read, and my love of the medium has
grown with my understanding of it.
Comics
are an invisible art, a marriage of words and pictures, with a profoundly
accessible visual language. Comics iconography permeates human society like a
crazy-quilt tattoo: unsurprising when you consider that Comics have been with
us since the first caveman daubed the first cave wall with steaming elk blood.
Comics
is a medium that thrives on immediacy - the visual language of comics bypasses
the intellectual barriers of prose fiction (including the ability to read). In
many respects, it as as close to a printed form of telepathy as can be found
anywhere in the world.
From
my mind to my hands to our page to your eyes to your mind, Comics is the most
versatile (and undervalued) medium on Earth.
Let's
see where it takes us...
WHY
ENTERARTS?
I
began test trading as a self-employed writer and comics creator in September
2003.Thanks to the New Deal from my
local JobCentre, I gained access to a number ofopportunities to learn the ins-and-outs of self-employment.
Aware
that most business courses are geared to the entrepreneur and the small
shopkeeper, I turned to the Prince's Trust for help in finding a course more
suited to the creative arts. A brief conversation with Moya Lloyd showed me
that the best place to find all the information and advice I might need in my
first year of self-employment would be through EnterArts.
While
on the course, I have begun putting together a project looking into increasing
access to Comics for the Disabled - a project I hope to develop more fully
throughout 2004.
I
decided that the best way to advertise my work - especially when I'm not there
to sell it - would be to give away some freebies. To that end, I produced three
pieces to be mass-photocopied and stored in hoppers attached to the installation
display boards. These pieces - two minicomics and one prose story - were printed
onto a single sheet of A4, and folded into � A4-sized booklets. Each piece was labeled
with the URL for this website.
The comics were mounted on
three 8'x4' hardwood boards, having first been fixed to display boards with sticky pads.
Preview images and advertisements for my
current and upcoming work were included in the display. The thematthewcraigdotcom
URL was prominently displayed, as were the URLs for Working
Title Comics and Robot
FIST!
To maintain "brand continuity," I made sure that as much of the printed text - the signs and the
biographical posters - were printed in the same fonts used in the making of this
website.
The free minicomics and prose
story were
first printed onto A4, then photocopied and reduced, in order to fit all four
sheets onto one page of A4. The individual pages needed to be copied in the
correct orientation, so that they would come out the right way up when folded
into �-A4 pamphlets. This technique of creating cheap and easily distributed
comics comes from Scott
McCloud's book Reinventing Comics, and inspired me to create the very first Hondle
comic, almost three years ago.
The comics and prose
stories were stored in home-made hoppers,
which I put together out of old (and not-so-old) cereal boxes, lined with thematthewcraigdotcom
printouts. The hoppers were designed to look as inviting as possible, to offset
people's normal nervous reaction to being offered something free in an art
gallery. Each of the hoppers were refilled once during the course of the
exhibition.
And this is me. The Artist,
surveying his work. Please note that I am sitting down, and not just really
short.
