‘Tommy’ Cover – 1969

I liked the ‘idea’ of the Tommy character. Rather than trying to portray him I wanted to picture his experience of being in a world without conventional senses. I thought it would be limitless and unbounded yet trapped in an environment made for people who have all their senses.

The ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ cover seemed the appropriate place to encapsulate this contradiction. The cover uses the form of the globe to represent both the Earth and Self floating in an endless infinite black universe like space. A space that can never be touched, only imagined.

‘Tommy’ Inside cover

The inside cover depicts a wall with wall lights as a symbol of domestic space. It is a space we can all touch and a room we all live in.

But the light from the lamps does not behave as in our sighted world, it does not anchor objects to surfaces but appears to shift and change under Tommy’s searching fingers.