A 600-page monograph designed to embody the expansive, unruly logic of Gilbert & George’s artistic universe.

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The design of The Meaning of The Earth is deliberately immersive and disruptive, reflecting the artists’ practice rather than simply documenting a series of works. It’s a chaotic mash-up of the traditional and the contemporary, with a fundamentally unruly design approach that breaks all its own rules and makes up new ones as it goes along.

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Gilbert & George’s works are pulled through the body of the text with energy and rhythm, creating a visual map to accompany Wolf Jahn’s expressive and epic writing. Only the artists’ images are allowed to sit large across the pages – all other works and comparative references are deliberately shrunk to postage-stamp scale and thrown into the margins. This imbalance is intentional – reflecting the importance of the unique system of meaning Gilbert & George have wrought within their practice.

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The typography is functional but forceful – setting the pace for the reader’s movement through dense passages of text and sudden expanses of image. Captions, often drawn from the artists’ recollections, are placed close to the works, offering flashes of personal narrative amid the visual onslaught. Materially, the book is equally considered. Because handwritten notes are a recurring element in Gilbert & George’s practice, edge-printing the book with one from them to the reader felt like an apposite way to extend that performance to the book as an object. The book’s scale is equally deliberate – large, heavy, and physically insistent – a reflection of the intensity and totality of the world it contains.

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Designing The Meaning of the Earth was an epic undertaking – nearly 600 pages covering decades of work, thought and provocation. It needed to hold not just the artists’ images, but the mythology and many systems of meaning of the epic and sprawling world created by these behemoths of British art. Nothing in the book is neutral. Every element – layout, structure, pacing, surface – is a response to the particular logic of Gilbert & George’s practice. It was a privilege to create.

Artist: Gilbert & George

Author: Wolf Jahn

Design: BIllie Temple 

Design Assistance: Jenna Burwell

Published by Hurtwood Press