Eye Magazine

Next week on the Eye blog we’ll be launching the first in a series of 26 visual romps through the pages of Mr Edwards’ Crap Book. Each week will feature a different letter of the alphabet to brighten up your Friday.

Mr Edwards studied at St Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins) and the Royal College of Art, where he started collecting images and making scrapbooks. On leaving the RCA he worked under Terry Jones and Stephen Male at i-D magazine, where he nurtured his love of print – watching early runs of the magazine coming off the press out of register, with separations transposed or colours missing – and of lo-tech typography.

He left i-D to set up Nice (see ‘Go-faster graphics’, Eye 16) with Male and Richard Bonner-Morgan; after dark, he and Bonner-Morgan would raid the fruit stalls round the back of Holborn Tube station looking for graphically interesting fruit crates.

By juxtaposing found images and bits of type taken out of context, Mr Edwards creates a visual poetry in the Dada tradition and collages that he describes as ‘a kind of halfy halfy love child between Blake and Paolozzi’.

Organised into alphabetical order, Mr Edwards’ Crap Book could be viewed as a source book for creatives of every stripe – though he describes it as more of a multilayered collage, something that involves some exploration and discovery on the part of the viewer. It is both amusing and slightly disturbing – a bit like his haircut.

He is currently looking for a like-minded publisher.

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