JOHN LENNON’S LIVERPOOL & YOKO ONO’S TOKYO

Two 46-inch square gamified map artworks created by fine artist Ed Fairburn containing over 700 individually numbered locations, highlighted in ultra-violet ink. Available folded in a wallet with accompanying booklets that detail all the historical stories behind the individual locations in JOHN LENNON’S LIVERPOOL & YOKO ONO’S TOKYO. The maps are based on Liverpool from the 1940s and Tokyo from the 1930s.

Over 700 individually numbered locations are highlighted in ultra-violet ink.

Accompanying booklets tell the stories of JOHN LENNON’S LIVERPOOL & YOKO ONO’S TOKYO in over 700 individual locations across the cities.

JOHN LENNON’S LIVERPOOL

John: Liverpool was a very poor city, and tough. But people have a sense of humour because they are in so much pain, so they are always cracking jokes. They are very witty, and it’s an Irish place. It is where the Irish came when they ran out of potatoes, and it’s where black people were left or worked as slaves. And created communities. It’s cosmopolitan, and it’s where the sailors would come home with the blues records from America on the ships. There is the biggest Country & Western following in England in Liverpool, besides London — always besides London, because there is more of it there. I remember the first guitar I ever saw was a guy in a cowboy suit in a province of Liverpool in the stars with the cowboy hat and a big dobro! And they’re all playing, they’re real cowboys there, they take it seriously, there’ve been cowboys long before there was rock and roll. It’s real, and there’s folk clubs and there’s all that going on there so there’s all that kind of environment, you know. We always talk about the Cavern and the dance halls in Liverpool, ’cause that’s when we were really hot musically.

Yoko: The first place John took me to after we got together – guess where – was Liverpool! He was proud of the city he was born and grew up in. John had a very warm view of his past. He thought of Liverpool as a place that was incredibly wonderful. I didn’t hear that from many others at the time. Some people who leave the city they were born in or grew up in say, ‘Thank God I left.’ But John always thought it was a great place and he loved it. In the last week of his life he was planning to go visit his England on the QE2. He wanted to go to Liverpool and show the city he was from to his son Sean.

YOKO ONO’S TOKYO

Yoko: I’m a Tokyo girl! It’s so nostalgic for me to be in Japan. John really loves it, he’s been eating Japanese food from morning to evening and really enjoyed going to see Kabuki. I was happiest about getting to see my mother and getting to eat her home-cooked food. I was born in Tokyo. But what I love about Tokyo now has little to do with the Tokyo I knew a long time ago. It’s to do with the soul, and the travelogue of the soul. There was a very good mixture of the spirit and the material in the sense that the material things that existed there were only a kind of expression of the spirit. And that was very interesting. Now it’s the city of the future. The neon lights are brighter than anywhere else, when you come back to New York, you literally feel darker, even in Times Square.

ED FAIRBURN

Ed Fairburn is a fine artist who graduated from Cardiff School of Art and Design in 2012. He specialised in manipulating paper maps to construct other forms, usually portraiture, calling this process topopointillism; a direct combination of topography and pointillism.

Using traditional materials such as ink, paint and pencil, he makes gradual changes to the contours, roads and other patterns found in cartography. These changes allow him to tease out the human form, resulting in a comfortable coexistence of figure and landscape.

He aims to preserve the functionality of each map by feeding the composition instead of fighting it – often spending hours studying the terrain before he begins any physical processes.

He is interested in the degree of subtlety behind each synchronisation, and the way in which a completed map behaves more like a portrait when viewed from further away – it’s almost paradoxical that a portrait should lose detail when examined closely.

Find out more about Ed at edfairburn.com.