Twenty years ago, artist Sam Winston discovered a room of unused words in the Oxford University Press (home of the Oxford English Dictionary). Penny Silva, Dictionary director at the time, gave Sam a tour, “she was showing me around when she took me into a small room full of index cards and declared… ‘this is the room where all the words that aren’t in The Dictionary are kept’.” Since that first spark of interest in 2004, Winston has gone on to create exhibitions and artworks inspired by this unseen words room and the creative potential of the dictionary.

This unique linguistic inspiration now forms the spine of a lyrical picture book created in collaboration with New York Times best-selling author-illustrator Oliver Jeffers. A call to kids and adults alike to create, to question, to explore, and to imagine, their magical project is intended to prompt young readers to ignite their love of language and discover where their words come from, and how we all have a story to tell.

In 2007 words like almond, blackberry and crocus in the Oxford Junior Dictionary made way for block graph and celebrity. In 2012 the edition maintained those changes, and further removed catkin, cauliflower, chestnut and clover, and now instead features cut and paste, broadband and analogue. The authors noted a pattern in which the natural world and external play-based childhood inferences are being replaced with internal, digital and sedentary past-times.

Winstone reflects, “It’s a book that I wish I had as a kid. When I was young I didn’t understand words, my imagination was crazy and reading seemed like torture. This book is for that person. I hope it inspires a reluctant reader to pick up a book and smile. Because when someone realises how powerful the spell of words can be, a new world of opportunities opens up for them.”

Definitions

ghost /ɡəʊst/ Believed to be the spirit of someone who is no longer in this world. Ghosts can appear as shadows, strange shapes or just silly people with bedsheets over their heads. They sometimes scare people, which means it is hard for them to make friends. Fortunately, puddles don’t get scared; puddles make friends with everyone.

puddle /ˈpʌd.əl/ A small pool of water. Puddles are often made by rain and they love to look at the sky. They will make friends with anyone who takes the time to say hi to them. Puddles are the friendliest things in the universe.

apple /ˈæp.əl / A hard round fruit with green, red or yellow skin. Some apples can send princesses to sleep or give people all knowledge. Other apples fall to the ground to help explain complicated laws. (See gravity.) If we leave apples alone, they turn themselves into trees. (See amazing.)

artist /ˈɑː.tɪst/ A person who spends a lot of time with new ideas – drawing, writing or acting them out. Some of these ideas turn out to be funny, some sad and some beautiful. Lots of colour and a few surprises are often involved. (See art.)

dream /driːm/ A word for things people see while asleep. Dreams are the brain’s way of showing you that you’re a lot more imaginative than you think. In the day, we fill our heads with sensible things, but dreams prefer to create strange things, for instance, glow-in-the-dark marmalade and inflatable chicken’s teeth. We’ve been studying dreams for hundreds of years and we still don’t really know what they are. That said, Martin Luther King Jr had a really great one.

heart /hɑːt/The organ that pumps blood around an animal’s body. It’s also the part of the body that helps people recover from trying to think too much. (See headache.) Hearts help heads make good decisions. When things are going well, the heart feels full; not so well, it aches.

Book tour dates
Saturday 17th August: London, Sunday 18th August: Edinburgh International Book Festival, Monday 19th August: Glasgow,
Tuesday 20th August: Manchester, UK

Tags: Books, children, for kids, Oliver Jeffers, publication, Sam Winston

We spoke to the co-founders Nora and Frida about the embryo for Nuda, whether artists should go to space, and looking within the self for definition. 

Tell us about the ethos behind Nuda, and how it came to be founded.

Nora Arrhenius Hagdahl: Nuda is foremost a space for us to create without interruption, a platform where you can make what you want to make because you enjoy making it. What we love to make most is books, probably because it’s a way to combine so many elements – art, design, text, ideas, photography, fashion, people and philosophy – and create a context and visual world for them. A Gesamtkunstwerk contained between cover and back. 

Frida Vega Salomonsson: The embryo for Nuda was originally founded when we were in high school. We were young, naive and wanted to spread our ideas and aesthetics with the world. Now we’re semi-young and semi-naive. We want to make books that are both thought provoking as well as nice looking. We never claim to have the answer, rather we like to ask questions and display different and sometimes opposite views on a topic. 

Your issues work on themes: how are these decided? 

N: We don’t decide on a theme, the theme decides on us. We exist in a fluxus of ideas and you just have to reach out and grab it. 

F: For this issue, Beyond, it came down to topics we’ve discussed and noticed in our own lives. I found myself at a tantra wedding and Nora had been freaking bothered by all her friends taking life advice from apps like Co-Star. When did that become a reasonable source to find direction for intellectual people?

N: It felt like people around us were searching for new spiritual and profound experiences. Sweden is a very secular and a country of sceptics, and all of a sudden everyone we knew were looking for answers in the stars, tarot cards, meditation and psychedelics. People are fascinated, need and want more to life than what reality can offer – so that became the world we wanted to explore. 

With the culling and closure of many publishing houses in light of C19, will we see a sort of Darwinistic evolution of magazines? What does its future look like to you?

F: I don’t know? Are people still stupid enough to start print publications? It’s a trap, heaps of work – small payout (but a lot of fun, at least that’s what we tell ourselves). Hopefully other people are not as naive as we are, but you have to finish what you started right? Hopefully Covid-times will at least make people more interested in reading, because what else can you do when in lockdown?

N: It’s a great time to feed your intellect and indulge in imagery, concepts, thoughts and reflection. In history, dark times prove to be very constructive for creativity and often become a time when people can explore outside of the set framework, a source of originality one can say maybe? Change can be a good ground to explore new ideas. 

F: Being on the edge on survival may serve as a profound source of inspiration? I hope so. Future looks dark from over here, but even more reason to continue. Fingers crossed.

Nuda is based in Stockholm: has this influenced the magazine at all?

N: Have you ever been in Stockholm? It’s clean and in winter it’s quiet and dark as fuck – maybe that has influenced our aesthetic.

F: Stockholm is also a very small city, there isn’t one isolated fashion scene, one isolated art scene and one isolated design scene. All these scenes are merged together and influence each other, perhaps more than in most cities, because it’s a necessity. That’s an approach we have for the magazine as well. Mixing ideas and people from various fields. 

N: Rather than only looking at what’s around us and picking up inspiration from what we see, for this issue at least, we wanted to look at what’s within us, look at what we can’t see but feel. Aiming to touch on those experiences that are of a more universal character.

What can we expect from your third issue, Beyond, that has just been released?

F: Beyond is a guided journey through the immaterial aspects of life. We humans, and all species, have very limited ways to experience the world, we have to rely on our senses, our eyes, our nose. But there is so much out there that we can’t see or register with our senses. What if all humans were born with eyes that would only allow x-ray vision, that would dramatically affect our conception of the world around us.

N: In the book Marina Abramović tells us about her belief in parallel realities and Michael Pollan argues for the benefits of psychedelics. The astronaut Christer Fuglesang speaks about whether we should have artists in space and Jemima Kirke says the only spirituality that exists is love. Jeremy Shaw speaks about the multiple views of transcendence, Roy Andersson don’t believe in a life after this. Johnny Johansson says that god, for all he knows, could be a rabbit. The artist Cecilia Edefalk holds a séance to make contact with Hilma af Klint and the famous spoon bender Uri Geller speaks about his encounters with extra-terrestrials – it’s a march of different perspectives on the immaterial and the world beyond! 

What can we expect from Nuda in the future?

F: Don’t expect so much from us. To quote the legend Stephen Hawking: “My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.”

N: Or as Sylvia Plath says: “If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”

F: Perhaps Bruce Lee said it best, “I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”

Follow nuda on: @nudapaper

Tags: Art, Art Book, publication