Report from the Surface
Report from the Surface is the result of a collaboration between visual artist Craig Hill and
writer Phil Brooks. (2020-2023).
Using coloring books ranging from the 1930s to the early 2000s, Craig Hill has created a series
of 25 bizarre and darkly humorous collage scenes —dreams, space adventures, and exotic
fantasies that seem to bring some sort of dark subconscious into view. The shared themes and
content of the series of visuals inspired Brooks’s poetic text, becoming fodder for a warped,
quasi-religious folklore.
As an artistic team, Hill and Brooks developed a kind of visual and poetic osmosis. The texts
rarely responded directly to a specific collage i.e., the text was not a “caption” for a given
collage, nor was any collage created as an “illustration” for a poem. In addition, unlike in most
collaborations between a poet and visual artist, it was Hill who generally matched a text to a
chosen collage before ordering the whole to create a dreamy narrative where image and text
complemented each other.
In the end, the creative process wed Hill’s hallucinatory visions with Brooks’s uncanny, blurred
recollections of love, interstellar travel, and religious origin story. Their hope is that the
experience of “reading” the complex imagery of the collages alongside the evocative poems
creates something like scenes from a silent movie watched in the mind’s eye.