Neglected Dimensions: Sketches for Public Space

Poet, dramaturge and public artist, Paul Carter, writes and draws public space as a movement form, representing the neglected dimensions of the meeting place. His poetics of the trace finds a superb visual metaphor in John Warwicker's book design.

The essay is a drawing out of implications in the sketches, a suspension of related but different thematic molecules, from which on a 'like to like' principle, sketches are periodically hatched. Colloidal structures are formed at the interface between media: dispersing text and image through each other, the book's design discovers a new interface. Each page exhibits an 'enormous development of surface relative to the amount of matter present'. The magnification of subdivisions (the page) produces new textua distributions intermediate between the solid and the gaseous. The book inhabits its own neglected dimensions. It is a worked example of the view that writing and drawing enact and mobilise what they describe: in a CAD-dominated design culture, this redefinition of representation is timely and liberatory.