Rat - Jakub Marjanski

I decided to follow the Rat for the project, the reason I took the rat is because the idea of an animal that represents pestilence fascinated me. I instantly jumped to looking at the disgusting side of rats and found that the animal is actually quite clean. I had to look quite hard to find pictures of sewer rats and diseased ones on the streets of New York city. Eventually I collected a range of images that I sketched out.

With that I went on to look up the pestilence part of this project. I looked at depictions of gods and concepts such as the 4 riders of the apocalypse. In my search I found the black death and that it came in 3 different versions that plagued different parts of the world. I decided to make that my main theme.

With that discovery I decided that I should depict the disease moving from one place to the other like it did. In a tutorial I was informed of concertina books, their long length were perfect for the subject.

Final Piece

The final piece was made with 3 cellulose thinner prints of works I have done in my book, each representing the location where black death happened. The in-between parts are transitions made with a Graphite pencil (I also went over the prints with it to make them darker and feel like an old painting). The band around the book was made with a map to add to the travel aspect and the actual book is made with Fabriano paper. It's missing text that was meant to accompany the images but I didn't have enough time to add them to the piece.

The first image represents the Byzantine empire, second Europe and last China.