Matt Huynh – Diffusion Residency, August 2008
Matt Huynh is a comic creator and illustrator based in Sydney, Australia. In August 2008 he visited London for a Diffusion residency at our studio in Clerkenwell. Matt worked on two Diffusion projects whilst on the residency; in his own words, “The eBook is a format developed for easy, viral distribution, so my challenge was to take it in the other direction to create a unique version of the eBook that would be difficult to reproduce and mass distribute.” The first project resulted in a single unique work adapted from the eBook folding format. Matt’s eBook, Anytime, contains an artist’s statement about the work and his process.
The second project, insideout, used the eBook as the format to create and distribute a free comic – “a playful 27 page comic-booklet about the contradictions of affection (with ghosts).”
“When it came to developing the ‘eBook’ format, I was inspired to reflect its encouragement of sharing creative processes and ideas in the comic book’s subject matter and style.
The comic’s aesthetic is almost completely created with soft pencils. In commercial comics processes, the penciling stage is one of the initial processes in creating a work’s visual aesthetic. Here, I’ve chosen pencils, sometimes with my construction lines even peeping through, as the final aesthetic to capture and showcase this project’s ambition to share process.
It was with the transparency of process at the forefront of my mind that I was inspired to have the protagonists of ‘insideout’ appear as ghosts, and it was with the aim of being open to embrace and share ideas and processes that I modeled the narrative to concern these ghosts’ conflicting attitudes towards demonstrating and receiving affection and their fear to venture outside the door of their haunted home.”
