At the end of his second year at Kingston, Jasper completed his dissertation ‘British Surrealism. Interviews with: Eileen Agar, Conroy Maddox, George Melly, Roland Penrose, Julian Treveleyan’. It consisted of a series of interviews with then-forgotten British Surrealist artists, typed up and compiled in a handmade construction with photographs of the subjects and their work.
Faced with the need to prepare a thesis as part of my Design degree course at Kingston Polytechnic in 1981, and drawing on my sideline activities as a bookdealer, I decided to compile a set of interviews on British Surrealism. I found telephone numbers for most of the surviving players in the London phone books and arranged to visit them, record their memories and take a few photos. While it seemed a perfectly natural thing to do at the time, it now seems surprising that they all agreed and were so forthcoming with their stories.
I made the thesis with painted plywood panels stapled to a cloth spine and aluminium bars bolted through to capture the pages. The photographs are black and white prints I made in a cupboard at home and the titles were composed with a set of German building blocks with some Greek votive eyes for O’s.
The title page for the interview with Roland Penrose, with votive eyes for his o’s.
The text was typed by Jasper.
Jasper’s photograph of a corner of Eileen Agar’s studio.