Ellen Lindner

Ellen Lindner is a cartoonist and illustrator based in London, England, where she is currently studying for her MA in Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts. Author of Oval Comics and contributor to anthologies including Scheherezade, True Porn and Whores of Mensa, Ellen will soon be finishing her first graphic novel, Undertow, a tale of Coney Island in the 1950's. She has also created a series of comics about history and geography for the McGraw-Hill Companies. For details of these and other projects, please visit http://www.littlewhitebird.com

My installation will tell the story of what happens to the workers in a rare books shop in London when the nearest Tube station closes. The young female cataloguer, plagued by a morbid depression, will find that the desolation of the neighborhood, made more extreme by the closing of the subway line out, drives her ever inward, causing her to fixate more and more on her past. For the proprietor of the shop, it's the perfect moment to reveal his new plan for financial solvency, a scheme for selling entire libraries to rich foreigners - but will either of them make it through the night?

The characters, being essentially mute, will not benefit from the possibilities for exposition inherent in more traditional comics. Instead, their histories will play themselves out on the walls around them -ink-wash drawings from floor to ceiling, on the interior of an ordinary looking London apartment block. Each character will appear in numerous, compartmentalized locations - emerging from the Tube, climbing the steps, sitting on the balcony for a cigarette. I'm also exploring various means of imprinting words into their surroundings, to reflect an overarching thought pattern.

The block will incorporate the apartment building (with the shop on the ground floor), the Tube station, and a junkyard. I'm currently on the lookout for items to fill the junkyard, so if anyone has any weird old things they think might be suitable, please contact me!