Cutaway

Cutaway One - John Swogger, 2010

Been working on some rather tangential ideas for The Way involving cutaway views. These are a staple part of my own archaeological illustration portfolio – as they are for anyone doing any kind of technical illustration work. I’m well used to the way they work, to their conventions, their advantages and their disadvantages – but I was reminded back in October at the VIA conference just how alien a viewpoint they are for some people.

I’ve become interested in the subtleties of the language of cutaways and diagrams in general – about the way they merge text and image, but do so in accordance with very specific and not always very obvious rules. There’s a strange reductive aesthetic at work to reduce the artefacts of real life to a highly structured symbolic language that is supposedly more “real” than their real origins. Cutaway diagrams, like X-rays, show you the “truth” of something because of their ability to show the inside and the out – the hidden and the revealed – at the same time.

I’ve also become interested in the context of these illustrations – in the mechanical, technical, “scientific” world they inhabit. These are the illustrations of medicine, of engineering, geology and the structural sciences (and yes, of archaeology, too). They are an unreal depiction of the very real, very concrete world.

In their unreality, don’t they seem to mock the physical mundanity of their subject matter? And yet no one sees them as “unreal”. I’d like to explore more about how these illustrations work, and how some of their conventions might be used to – literally, I suppose – see inside, behind or beneath – the physical environment under depiction. I like the way that they combine the conventions of illustration and art – a convergence I’d like to explore further in regard to “The Way”.