William Blake Final — Billie Huang

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William Blake Final May 2023 [Columbia, MO]

I took a writing intensive course at Mizzou that focused on the writings, engravings, paintings, and other works by English poet and printmaker William Blake. I’m not much of a reader and struggled to find motivation to show to class and complete assigned readings. Despite this, this course was one of the more rewarding classes I’ve taken.

Most of Blake’s work deals with the human condition, subverting organized religion, spirituality, and politics. He relief-etched copper plates to print text and accompanying images of his works like Songs of Innocence and Experience. The religious allusions in his work stuck with me as I grew up going to Catholic school. While I don’t practice, being raised in the Catholic faith is part of my identity.

For this project, I took excerpts from William Blake's poems (along with one generated in his style by GPT), arranged them into easy-to-read graphics, screenprinted them onto clothes, and photographed my friends modeling them. I was inspired by Junya Watanabe's CDG menswear poem collections from the early 2000s. The goal of those CDG poems was to explore themes of humanity, love, and morality. The bold and accessible content of Watanabe's poems, reflected through the use of Helvetica—one of the easiest-to-read typefaces—paralleled the themes in Blake's work. I decided to model the clothing and graphics after the CDG Watanabe collections. My process of making these garments, including the serigraphy and printmaking, mirrors how Blake produced his work. Through photos and garments, I attempted to juxtapose the purity behind his Innocence work with the darker themes of Experience.

These are the materials from the final project that I designed, printed, photographed, and submitted for the William Blake course.

PDF Link

Special thanks to my friends for modeling: Gage Shrout, Payson Davenport, Tyler McGuirk, Hannah Westhoff

huangbillie@gmail.com