Relaxation Tips: Swallowing Illustrations

The whole idea behind Swallow is to bring to the reader a new kind of book. Not just lines of words but images that could bring more weight to those words. The reader is supposed to meander through Swallow. It's not a play, really. It's more of a walk where one purposely gets themselves lost. Twists and turns down alleys and streets, sneaking through back yards and glimpsing through blue light TV rooms.


These are the images which encompass the majority of the scenes put forward in the play.


Teasers before the words.

In The Beginning...

Wolverine Bailey must apologise, firstly, for arriving late to the banquet. The printed word fad. What else can be hoped for from it? Can we expect another Ulysses? Another Middlemarch? Pity the poor writer who produces such a work. Who labours for years, agonising over every sentence, neglecting a healthy sex life. Only to have their masterpiece read by a few liquid-brained Professors who will proclaim it a masterpiece, but, after all, too much indebted to him or her or whomever. Some corpse. The sprawling, rambling, back breaking tome novel is an anachronism. And the Wolverine Bailey is only interested in producing art that is of this moment. That can be enjoyed right now. That will allow literature’s maggot riddled carcass to announce itself, alive and kicking, in the twenty-first century. For this reason, Swallow offers the reader twenty-four austere glimpses into the world of the Wolverine Bailey. It is like a bag filled with twenty-four pieces of hard, black candy. Or twenty-four pieces of polished bone that form the spine of some wild animal. Or twenty-four pieces of jade stone threaded on wire and strapped to the neck of a down and out songbird. And when a reader enters the world of the Wolverine Bailey, they will realise what other literature has been keeping from them. Some will consider it merely an attempt to shock. An attempt to shock? That would be to say something that isn’t true. Real rap died with 2pac is an attempt to shock. Were Antonin Artaud and Sarah Kane attempting to shock? No. They only had one intention, one single, unflinching goal, and this is the goal carved into the very flesh of the Wolverine Bailey: to tell the truth. The fact of the matter is, what other literature is showing the world is only a sample of our day. The phone conversations, the cups of coffee, the admiration of a flower. The rest of the time, where are we? Dreaming. Fantasising. Playing. Pretending. We look to art for truth, for understanding. So why would we settle for a literature that lies to us? It will be a brave entity that joins forces with the Wolverine Bailey. But the rewards will indeed be great. So read our work. View our art. Try and remember the last time you felt excited going into a bookstore. Then ask yourself, do you have what it takes?