Landfill Editions show us a bunch of its brilliant new illustration titles

Date
22 June 2018

When not publishing its brilliant magazine Mould Map, Landfill Editions are equally brilliant book publishers, working with illustration, graphic design and everything in between. With a stack of new titles for you to peruse, we caught up with the publishing house to see what has recently come back from the printers.

The first is 4 Fragments, the latest comic by Dutch illustrator Viktor Hachmang whose comic strip led books have had us falling head over heels for his detailed eye. Comprised of “four hyper-coloured dream sequences, each obliquely referencing recent news events,” the results are relatively ambiguous but intriguing nonetheless. Designed as parables, the publication is “interspersed with ecstatic collages made from reused panels and source materials.” By playing with such varied context from the constantly updating feed of news we have at our disposal, each page made by Viktor is different from the last, but always busy and impressively vibrant.

Next up is a more pared-back illustration title by Tom Sewell titled Twenty Imaginary Standing Stones. Each drawing is fictional and was originally illustrated as “a response to the traditional drawn documentation of Chinese Gongshi,” also known as scholar rocks. The drawings “became a body of pictures produced in part as documentation of themselves as much as an attempt to represent the variousness of objects,” explains the publisher. Printed in a grey scale colour palette, excluding its purple cover, pages represent a “metaphor for the unknowability of things in nature,” Landfill Editions continues. “But they are also about history and time; they refer to standing stones, flint tools and Cairns. In the drawings’ breadth of natural materials, "they can’t help but be about human attempts to confront their place within nature.”

Continuing the black and white colour theme is Clark Keatley, another illustrator whose new title is Stuck in the Past. Opening with a quote, “Where you grew up, that’s your inner world,” by American artist Mike Kelley, the publication “is a walk through subjective atmosphere and time,” says the publisher. Through the depiction of abstract thoughts in neighbourhood environments and busy desks, the title tries to “make sense of a world departing from established material systems towards metaphysical structures,” through illustration.

A more abstract illustrated title from Landfill is by Stuart McKenzie, presenting a continuation of his Deo Drawings series, first shown in Nottingham last year. Black ink drawings fill the pages of the publication, interestingly applied with a repurposed roll-on deodorant. “These studies reference his work as a commercial fashion illustrator, while expanding on the silhouette to propose narrative and exchange between the characters portrayed," explains the publisher.

The final title, a joint edition made by Leon Sadler and Yannick Val Gesto, is a video game illustrated world. Forming a concrete environment, its characters live in between “slabs that humanoids reside,” says Landfill. “These buildings are surrounded by huge layers of dense vegetation and forests, trees and vines as high as the clouds and flowers as small as you can imagine." The ecosystem is drawn in a free-flowing illustrated style, using ink and one fading pink shade.

Each of these Landfill Editions titles, and many, many more, are available to explore here.

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Viktor Hachmang: 4 Fragments

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Viktor Hachmang: 4 Fragments

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Viktor Hachmang: 4 Fragments

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Tom Sewell: Twenty Imaginary Standing Stones

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Tom Sewell: Twenty Imaginary Standing Stones

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Clark Keatley: Stuck in the Past

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Clark Keatley: Stuck in the Past

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Stuart McKenzie: Deo Drawings

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Stuart McKenzie: Deo Drawings

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Leon Sadler and Yannick Val Gesto: Little Proposal

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Leon Sadler and Yannick Val Gesto: Little Proposal

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About the Author

Lucy Bourton

Lucy (she/her) is the senior editor at Insights, a research-driven department with It's Nice That. Get in contact with her for potential Insights collaborations or to discuss Insights' fortnightly column, POV. Lucy has been a part of the team at It's Nice That since 2016, first joining as a staff writer after graduating from Chelsea College of Art with a degree in Graphic Design Communication.

lb@itsnicethat.com

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