A5, 20 colour
pages
£3.62 (+
£3.62 p&p)
Synesthesia (the
zine) dives headfirst into delirium. Stacey Matchett evokes a sense of
desperate, inescapable confusion in her pastel colour palettes, bold rainbow
scribbles and delicate black linework - it’s a beautiful assault on the senses.
Usually
when poetry and artwork appear together in print, the images end up playing
second fiddle; they usually serve as garnish, pretty pictures to illustrate the
words. Matchett turns this convention on its head. The bright images dominate
the pages of this zine, holding hostage the reader’s psyche and rendering the accompanying
poetry somewhat redundant. It’s not that the poetry is particularly poor, more
that within the psychedelic pages of Synesthesia
its role is secondary to the artwork.
When I
first encountered Matchett’s work in volume one of Break the Chain, I described it as “grunge expressionism”. Reading
through Synesthesia, it seems clear
to me now that her work is too nebulous to fit within that category; her art
style shifts throughout the pages, and yet each drawing bears her stylistic
signature.
Matchett
does a great job of creating a collection of artwork centred upon a theme
without falling into predictability – each page explores a different facet of a
disorganised mind and does so with a touching vulnerability.
