I’m over the moon for this job, the poster for the 2021 edition of Bloomsday in Trieste, this was commissioned to me by the Joyce Museum of Trieste Ulysses https://museojoycetrieste.it/en/joyce-museum-eng/. James Joyce lived in Trieste for 10 years and it was there that he wrote the first three chapters of.

Bloomsday is the once-a-year celebration of Ulysses, the ground-breaking novel depicting one day in the life of antihero Leopold Bloom, and that day is 16th June 1922, so now every 16th June all around the world people of letters celebrate James Joyce’s work by focusing on one chapter of the book.

Only that this year focus is not just one chapter but two, for the reason that chapters one and four both describe events happening between 8am and 9am. Chapter one called Telemachus tells us about the start of the day of Stephen Dedalus (James Joyce’s alter ego and already the protagonist of his earlier book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), chapter 4 called Calypso is instead the actual start of the day of Leopold Bloom.

Chapter one is about a brooding poet, full of angst, chapter 4 is about the quintessential everyman and his mundane thoughts. We see him feeding the cat, then bringing breakfast to his sleeping wife and ultimately reading the newspaper sitting on the toilet.

Hardly two chapters could be more different from one another and therefore to pair them into one illustration was a unique challenge.

Then reading and re-reading I finally realized the point of contact I could use, and it was Eros and Thanatos because both have a relationship with a woman on a bed, for Bloom it’s his wife Molly, for Dedalus it’s his dying Mum begging him to pray for her departing soul. Unfortunately for her her atheist son he had been unable to do so and for that he was now scorned for this by his friend Buck Mulligan.

For the festival I developed a series of variation on the illustration for various uses, tall and narrow for posters, square for socials, wide for banners, A4 for brochures, and did the graphic design side also putting together the booklet of the program.

Bloom’s cat also found a use on its own (cats are individualists by nature) as the Museum’s avatar for the duration of the festival!