Rawle, Graham
Entry updated 23 September 2024. Tagged: Artist, Author.
(1955-2024) UK artist, designer and author, best known for the long Lost Consonants series of comic collages released from 1990 to 2005; his profusely illustrated 2009 edition of L Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz (1900), using the original text, won him two British Book Design and Production awards. He is of some sf interest for Overland (2018), which fantasticates an historical event from 1942: the construction of a fake town (see Zone; Zoo) over the low-lying Lockheed aircraft plant as camouflage against air raids. In Rawle's depiction, Overland vies with the surveillance-heavy Paranoia-inducing artifactuality of the towns featured in films like Pleasantville (1998) or The Truman Show (1998). The master designer and chief operating executive is a Hollywood art director named George Godfrey (Rawle repeats Alisdair Gray's loaded joke in Poor Things (1992), one repeated in the film Poor Things, by nicknaming him God). After World War Two ends, Overland is dismantled, leaving the paid cast that has inhabited it bereft. [JC]
Graham Rawle
born Birmingham, England: 22 July 1955
died London: 16 August 2024
works (highly selected)
- Overland (London: Chatto and Windus, 2018) [pb/Graham Rawle]
links
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