Abbie Townend

OngoingSketchbooks and Drawings
Scribbling and Marks


2023Rocks
The Machine Stops
Enfleshed
John Murray Original
The Veil


2021

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The Machine Stops


A visual response to The Machine Stops by E.M Foster.  A loose leaf publication printed on a range of different papers. It is a collection of images and text that come in a box allowing you to look through them, rearrange and lay them out.





‘The ‘future’ on the quantum level, cannot be predicted – but to describe reality, the present world.

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.

The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like – what’s going on – what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes: listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent telling lies.

Then when they are done writing down this back of lies, they say, There! That’s the truth!’

-  Ursula K Le Guin.








Sketchbook.