Michael Williams: Traditional Cornish Cottages

Michael Williams' Traditional Cornish Cottages is an artist's book that layers hand-drawn portraiture with the flattened imagery of the internet.

Throughout the 112-page volume, drawings of faces and figures are repeatedly interrupted by a uniform, cropped image of a browser window open on a lifestyle or commerce website, as though the screen itself were intruding on the drawn page. These sequences alternate with runs of entirely black and entirely white pages, producing a flickering effect Williams has compared to rapidly clicking back through a browsing history. Despite its topographic-sounding title, the book has no connection to Cornwall or vernacular architecture; the title reads as one more found, incongruous fragment of online language. Published by Karma, New York, in a softcover edition of 750.

It is the fifth artist's book Williams has made with Karma, part of an ongoing series of print projects that run alongside his paintings. Williams (born 1978) is known for large-scale, airbrushed and inkjet-transferred paintings mixing collage, cartooning and abstraction; his books extend that interest in appropriated, mass-produced imagery into a graphic, black-and-white register.