This Year’s Artwork

The gorgeous illustrations adorning the new website are thanks to the talents of Emix Regulus who also designed the Earth core merch at last year’s SN. Here’s what she has to say about the inspiration behind her work:

The updated Supernormal design process was all about creating something distinctive and new, yet also being a recognisable evolution of what had come before, maintaining a bond with the origins of Supernormal. The founding principles of the festival are all about experimentation and pushing for higher knowledge and understanding of human interaction, so I ran with this idea, creating images designed to bring to mind alien blueprints, impossible architectures and maps for new territories. Interwoven with these glyphs are motifs from Brazier’s and Supernormal’s collective pasts. For example, the “Supernormal triangle” pops up in a few places, resurrected from its use in previous years of the festival, and the circular motifs throughout are a nod towards the iconic black circle which John Latham painted on the drawing room wall at Brazier House during the 1964 Sigma gathering.

We also wanted the images to acknowledge the physical setting of the festival at leafy Braziers Park in Oxfordshire (the embryonic bird is a Red Kite, which has previously been associated with the festival), as well as the slightly rickety, hand-built nature of the stages and other buildings. It’s been suggested that the site dwells “at the intersection of 9 vortices” – swirls of invisible energy which are also visualised in the designs – perhaps that’s part of the reason why Supernormal is so unique!

Emilia (aka Emix Regulus) is an illustrator and comics artist whose work explores all terrain from cellular life through to the stranger recesses of the unconscious and the outer reaches of the cosmos. She shares comics and drawings at www.microcosmic-orbit.com.