The Lonnin Project: Making and Writing a Genre-Fluid Novel in Verse

Lonnin, an English dialect word, means a shared and borrowed, unofficial, track. The Lonnin Project is deliberately genre fluid, designed to resist classification by algorithm – an illustrated verse-novel and account of a creative process in which images, objects and texts are mutually affective. A quest for belonging, and the fickleness of recall in a fragile world, affect key characters in the narrative and the hybrid Project, which, in its entirety, explores creative outputs as a reciprocal refinement between image and text, reversing the habit of thought that prioritizes creative writing over art production. Here text is provisional until the visual illustrations are settled. This creative strategy has been relatively unexplored and so provides a useful guide for practice-based researchers, particularly those interested in Performance Writing.

Unusually, the text initially precedes and provokes 3D artworks which claim to belong to characters in the novel. These objects are slowly hand-built from sustainable, repurposed materials to become the antithesis of ‘merchandise’, occupying a mythical realm between the invented world of the story and material reality, where lonnin claims history resides. The objects are then re-expressed as 2D illustrations, refined to become cyanotypes, which subsequently modify the writing that originally inspired them.