9/11

Here is the page from my 2006 edition 'Lettering From America Pt.1' which particularly referenced the events of September 11th, 2001. One of the two editions featured in the Smith College exhibition (see previous post). Click on it for a larger version.
The following is an edit of what I wrote to accompany the exhibition:

If my editions are about anything at all, they are about the way things connect.
I began the strand of personal storytelling I call 'bio auto graphic' with an edition entitled 'Issue Zero' in 2004. Fortuitously, the template was set with this modest trial. I had wanted the whole to be flexible enough to embrace shifting senses of memory and location, themes both grand and intimate. . .
The largest themes are reflected in the smallest events.
In Issue Zero, for example, I shift from a farcical domestic anecdote to the events of that week in early September, a day that would knock the world to its knees. I used the outline of the towers as a central element in the design.
In Summer 2005 I made a trip to the USA, beginning in New York. . . Events of the full trip would later become the trilogy of issues I called the 'You, Nighted States' sequence (2005 - 6).
I was again able to suggest the spectre of the fallen towers, in a section that referenced our impression of Manhattan going about its business in the shadow of the recent terrorist atrocities on London's public transport system.
Questions of how we live – practically and spiritually – in times of such raw suspicion and fear fuel this page.
As an adoptive Londoner I had seen the aftermath of half a dozen attacks, but this latest had proven particularly unnerving, and I felt it important to visit 'Ground Zero' while in NYC.
Layer upon layer of meaning surround us every day, and we interpret them how we will. This is like as not shaped by our personalities and belief system – and the latter doesn't have to involve a god.

We connect to the world and it connects to us.
In 1987 I had stood at the top of a Twin Tower and looked to the horizon. An abstract thought passed through my mind: 'What will happen if it falls down?"
I never thought it would – but it did.

And we all still live with the impact of that moment.