The Brick House
An illuminated book about a house where people go to dream.
This is a book driven not by character, but instead formed around place and through specific dreams. In the book, the dreams contend with themes of love and loneliness and environmental degradation and sex and beauty and loss, but in the strange, elemental language which dreams allow for. Marcom’s desire to illuminate the book came in part because of her appreciation of William Blake’s work, and was also inspired by a love of Armenian illuminated manuscripts. She commissioned writer and artist, Fowzia Karimi, to do ten original black and white drawings for the book.
Fowzia Karimi has a background in Visual Arts and Biology. Her work explores the correspondence on the page between the written and the visual arts. She is the author of the novel Above Us the Milky Way.
“My favourite book of fiction this year...Fragmentary, ambiguous, fantastic, The Brick House is a celebratory work of the imagination.”
“In The Brick House, Marcom contemplates evolution and degradation. She looks back at how the human hand tainted the wildness of the earth and how the same hand later violated Nature’s body. She looks ahead to the future to predict how Nature could fight to win back her innocent form.”