Collaboration Graphic Design Publication

Ra-Bear & RELIK

posted by Jade Connolly May 26, 2016

Adam Griffiths, also known as Ra-Bear is a designer and art director based in Manchester UK. Working within graphic design, art direction, photography and video direction, he is also a current lecturer in Graphic Design at Manchester School of Art.

RELIK is a photo-essay documenting a series of automatic collages generated from the negative voids left within a range of printed artefacts. The remains of bygone collage works form a sequence of serendipitous portraits and landscapes, emphasising the art of chance and the beauty within the omission.

The project was born from organising the remnants of collage materials that have been swarming every square mm of his shelves, draws, studio floor over the last few years. Flicking through the skeletal books and magazines that have been hacked, torn, and stabbed in the name of collage, discovering that the negative spaces left from the previous work created a frame or window into a newly generated composition.

Ra-Bear is currently in the process of evolving the RELIK name into a new publishing platform, dedicated to conceptually driven, independent publishing ventures. The next forthcoming release is entitled M20 ZNE – a photo essay based around a city in flux. Documenting Manchester’s shifting balance between the old and new, a shoot from the hip account of how the walls of the city are expanding and how this urban sprawl has taken effect both on the city and its Mancunian suburbia.