Silent Quarter - book

Printed book (22.5cm x 16.6cm x 1.5 cm) hardback, cloth-bound with gold foiling on the cover. 5 x double sided fold-out pages with full-bleed illustrations.

Silent Quarter is a short story told through a combination of writing and drawing. The playful structure is most akin to a concept album. It has short written passages that fit together in a loose story arch which are like the ‘lyrics’. The ‘music’ is then provided by the large images that literally ‘open-up’ on fold-out pages and augment the text – lending mood, symbolism and providing time for reflection. The idea is not a fixed narrative but instead something that is open and flexible to the reader.

Silent Quarter is a darkly beautiful, illustrated short-story. It is an emotional and philosophically reflective journey through the mind of an old man - who is both a mask-maker and a barber - as he comes to the end of his long life of love, service, ceremony and creativity. The book plays with many forms of reality and delusion; exploring the shadowy distinction between them. From the magic of creativity and the powerful transformative effects of: masks, haircuts and thunderstorms - to the intense personal experience of: loss, the endurance of love and the importance of memory. It ranges from a seemingly solid sense of a community, a family, an ancestry - to ideas about spirituality, communion with the dead, rites of passage, portentous dreams and our own individual responses to the fact of mortality.

It is a story from a protagonist who is both anonymous but intensely familiar. He provides us with a fascinating prism for how people's private thoughts create their reality, and for exploring the mysteries of human experience - which leads us ultimately to consider how it is the simple things that really matter in life.

Self-published in collaboration with Antlers Gallery, Bristol, UK. Printed in Hong Kong. We collaborated with a number of talented creatives in the production of this book including Jono Lewarne (@cityeditionstudio) to help to design the book, Gemma Brace to edit the text and Helena Garcia to create our Kickstarter video.

Check out the successful kickstarter that made this project possible here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antlersgallery/silent-quarter-tim-lanes-short-story-and-drawing-b