Book Cover Designs

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Image, and cover design commissioned for the academic 'Impact of the Ancient City' series, Oxbow Press.

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Remembering and Forgetting the Ancient City

Remembering and Forgetting. This work explores how our understanding of the past is constantly reshaped by processes of memorialisation. By layering, interweaving and distorting the representational tropes of urbanism - arches, columns, windows, and walls - this image mimics the complex ways in which memories are formed and embedded within eachother

Cities as Palimpsests? 

This work engages with the metaphor of city as palimpsest. Palimpsests are pieces of parchment, or paper, upon which something is written and subsequently erased so that the parchment may be used again. This leaves traces of what has come before, producing a layering of different voices and times. Often it is remarked that cities are like palimpsests because they are built and rebuilt over time. This work was produced by layering paint in thin washes and taking it away to reveal an urban landscape.

Rome and the Colonial City

The idea of Rome and the Roman Empire has been key to the history of colonisation, because many empires have sought to emulate and outdo the ancient example. The arched aqueduct is of the most typical symbols of 'Romanitas': it has represented both imperial power and the subjugation of natural landscapes to engineering prowess. This image thinks about the output of an aqueduct in disintegration, in relation with the scholarly process of 'de-colonising the Classics', which seeks to understand and deconstruct how the reception of the ancient past has been key to colonial power dynamics and narratives.