Description
The limited edition boxed set of Mike Coles’s unique playing cards and mercenary rhymes project.
A pack of 56 A6 sized playing cards, a pack of 56 poker sized playing cards, a 120 page A5 sized full-colour book featuring the 56 card illustrations plus the associated 56 mercenary rhymes, and an audio CD of weird and disturbing soundscapes and spoken word.
This limited edition of 300 is numbered, stamped and signed by Mike Coles.
“I work with musicians a lot and they are constantly remixing and deconstructing their own music so I thought this would be a good approach to my own graphic work. I’ve always wanted to do a set of playing cards and I started working on this, mixing and remixing my own imagery to produce 52 cards + 4 jokers. This wasn’t enough though, I wanted to make it more than a deck of cards, so I decided to do a book of the images from the cards. But this still wasn’t enough, it needed words and I started playing around with nursery rhymes, with which I’ve had a long-time fascination, using traditional ones but adding my own lines. Then I started creating completely new rhymes in the traditional style – the more I stuck at it the more the traditional stuff was stripped away until I ended up with the 56 mercenary rhymes that feature in the book, around 20% traditional and 80% me, although it’s difficult sometimes to tell the difference. And if that wasn’t enough, I’ve produced a disturbing audio soundtrack of the mercenary rhymes, using spoken word, found sound and abstract noise.”
