Implicasphere
From 2004 to 2009 Sally O’Reilly and I created and co-edited the serial mini-publication, Implicasphere: an itinerary of meandering thought. Each issue attempted (in deliberate folly) to map on to a single broadsheet the meaning and use across culture and history of a simple everyday thing. The themes of the eight issues were String, Mice, Folly, The Nose, Salt & Pepper, Stripes, The Onion and Smoke.
The final five editions were distributed inside Cabinet, the New York-based magazine of art and culture, between 2006 and 2008.
“Cabinet, the most conceptually adventurous visual arts magazine to appear in the last decade … has helped to incubate another project [Implicasphere] undertaken in the same spirit of intellectual playfulness, which is folded into its pages.” —Eye 65 (Autumn 2007)
Implicasphere combined image and text fragments taken unadulterated from folk craft to nuclear physics, metaphysical poetry, pulp novels, linguistics, criminology, film noir and astrology. Our influences included folk almanacs, anthologies like the The Saturday Book (1940-60s, UK), and the archives of minor museums.
The Implicasphere project expanded to encompass discussion events, for example, examining the onion and its symbolism with experts from cosmology, literature and magic at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, in 2007. It culminated with the exhibition and public programme, Implicasphere: Smoke – at the Pump House Gallery, London, in 2008.
“Implicasphere, the self-styled ‘itinerary of meandering thought’ […] is a little magazine that would swallow the world — one that spins off from a simple idea and, at best, racks up such a diversity of archival embodiments of the guiding concept that ‘String’ or ‘Stripes’ or ‘Salt and Pepper’ seem, in the interval of reading borrowed quotations and viewing miniature illustrations, like a phantom key to the universe. At the same time, though, there is a subjectivity, randomness and winking playfulness about the approach that inspires as much doubt as certainty.” — Martin Herbert, Art Monthly
The first three Implicasphere editions were designed with Hoop design. For the Cabinet editions, the format was redeveloped and designed with Fraser Muggeridge.
Cathy Haynes 