Garamond Corpus

Garamond Corpus is an anthropomorphic study of our Latin letters based on Geoffroy Tory’s book Champ Fleury of 1529. In the book Tory compares the Latin letter shapes with human proportions.

I intend to do anatomical drawings of letters to illustrate a kind of imaginary skeleton with joints and muscles. As well as a play on the actual expression “alphabetical anatomy”, which usually refers to a character’s various components, the work is a deconstruction of the role of letters to represent language. The character is placed in a new context, as something organic and living.

Claude Garamond was a pupil of Tory, so I have chosen to use the font Garamond as a basis. My project will be compiled in an artists’ book.