Stanley Donwood: Dream Cargo

In early 2012 the publisher 4th Estate asked Stanley Donwood whether he would design new covers for the novels and collected stories of J.G. Ballard. Donwood, best known for two decades of Radiohead sleeves, said yes with obvious delight. Three years later the complete set of 21 images makes up Dream Cargo, at the Lawrence Alkin Gallery on New Compton Street from 27 March to 25 April 2015. The title comes from Dream Cargoes, one of his short stories.

Reading first

The first job was to read all 21 books, which was no hardship. Donwood counts Ballard among his favourite writers and a genuinely modern artist, someone able to describe the twentieth century and what came after with the fascination of “an obsessed surgeon” exposing a nervous system.

The second job was stranger. He contacted every university laboratory he could reach and ended up working in labs at Cambridge, Plymouth and Bath, with a clear picture of the effect he wanted and no idea how to get it. He had taken no exams in chemistry, but he remembered two things from school: holding a handful of greyish copper oxide under a dripping tap and watching it turn into blue copper sulphate, painfully, in his palm, and the pleasure of setting things alight and lighting the gas taps. The labs were a chance to put on a white coat and relive all that.

Chemistry as a working method

With the help of the scientists around him, and he was generous in his praise of them, Donwood worked through burning, explosion, oxidation, hydration and other processes, recording everything in notebooks and photographing the instant one substance turned into another. He did not decide individual covers in the lab. He kept all 21 books in mind at once and built up a large archive of sketches, photographs and fragments, and only later, sorting through what he called his ingredients, did he assign images to titles. The back of each book lists the experiments involved and credits the scientists and photographers.

Working like this means giving up some control, a prospect that frightens a lot of artists. Donwood welcomed it. For him the interesting ground is the point where control and its absence meet. His role became setting up the conditions, in effect designing the experiment, and then letting the materials act, though it is always a human hand that brings them together. Sometimes that meant gloves and tongs; sometimes it was just him pouring molten wax from a saucepan onto pools of water-based ink. The results can look wild and elemental, and the skill, he said, is in knowing when to stop.

The prints

At the gallery the images appear without their cover type, as large lambda prints mounted on aluminium under Diasec, each in a very small edition. Donwood said he was surprised by how well they stand without an author’s name, a title or a line of praise. For anyone who wants the words, there are smaller giclée editions that keep Ballard’s name and the titles.

A meeting that never happened

Ballard died in April 2009. Not long before, Donwood had the chance to meet him and turned it down, afraid that the writer would see straight through him. He now counts it a real regret. Asked how Ballard might have responded to the covers, he would not guess. Ballard loved surrealist painting, while Donwood has been moving away from figurative imagery and says he is more drawn to jarring juxtaposition than to surreal pairings. He hoped they might at least have agreed on a good single malt.