Magma Poetry Magazine Cover: Solitude issue

Magma Poetry Magazine commissioned me to illustrate the cover for their summer 2022 ‘Solitude’ edition. The concept we went with was inspired by The Allegory of the Cave: In the allegory, Socrates describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. The shadows represent the fragment of reality that we can normally perceive through our senses, while the objects under the sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason.

My take on this story shows a person inside a cave with a campfire - the rocks surrounding the fire create dancing shadows on the walls.

I thought this was an appropriate concept for solitude because it encapsulates the following: being cut off from the outside world; a sense of safety and containment; delving into internal narratives (the person can make up their own stories about the shadows and so their perception of the outside world gets distorted); and the feeling of a rabbit hole that one might get more and more sucked into.

Printed copy of the magazine cover

Illustration without the cover text

Previews of the issue on the Magma Poetry website