Homelight
by Gareth A Hopkins
I bought a number of books by this UK creator when I was at the Brew Zine comic fair in July. I wanted to say hello to Gareth as I’ve seen a few tweets about his work and been intrigued. To say he’s prolific is an understatement; I have the impression he just keeps producing page after page and assembling books, trying out new formats, folds, overlays and techniques as the work requires. At one level you could say his books are experiments in formats, challenging many conventions, in ways which (he told me) some prospective readers find a bit alarming.
I’ll jump straight in with Homelight, simply because I like the blue cover and I like something about the cover layout. In the back it states Gareth creates “abstract comics”. Opening the pages, immediately there’s a puzzle; foldouts and flaps where I least expect them. Information concealed underneath these folds. It’s not quite clear what order I should be reading in, if indeed there is a “right” order. But there are words, minimal phrases as if ripped from a poem, maybe two or three such fragments on a page. And sumptuous looking pages of blue blobs, smudges and smears.
Reach the end of Homelight and immediately I start reading again. What was that all about? Something about weather, sky, indoors, outdoors, reflections, and windows. Some of these elements having an effect, maybe an adverse effect, on the body, the eyesight, the entire nervous system. And those blue blobs aren’t just blobs; he’s painting over found images, or printing over them, evidently details of interiors and exteriors of houses. Likewise, ghost words and letters – covers of other books, maybe – float to the surface, printed backwards. More puzzling information to decode.
Where am I now? I’ve read it about 15 or 20 times over, now seeing connections between images and phrases, getting the feeling that information from pages in the back is bleeding through to the front. As if the whole book had been dipped in a substance that caused this “seepage” through the pages. What first may have appeared as an abstract page, a riot of decalcomania, is now taking shape as a carefully-composed arrangement. The collages are simple, straight, and true. The overpainting doesn’t so much conceal, or distort the photograph, but mutates it into a new visual image; we pull back and forth, the eye trying to penetrate the miasma of blues and whites, the photographic reality underneath creating an odd tension. Even that front cover layout is starting to reveal its structure now; a sideways staircase, doors and carpets in the wrong places, the familiarity of home transformed and made strange.
I just opened the book yet again and picked up on the subtitle “a frozen house, haunted”, and the subsequent pages with their hints of “feeling a presence” and characters not showing any reflections all suggest a minimal, post-modern ghost story of some sort. Yet with its fragments of verbal information, Homelight doesn’t tell a story so much as create strong impressions, as though the truth of sunlight and sky and weather and glass were all too much for one human to process, or understand. This is confirmed by the subtle, layered images; they seem to represent the eye, or the mind, of a human struggling with their senses, trying very hard to see – see something that’s almost invisible. The very format of the book invites the reader to do likewise; it worked for me, and I can’t stop looking at it.