Nostalgia: Cover by Alanah Sarginson

And here it is! Our cover for Clare's Spring/Summer 2020 issue, Nostalgia. This piece by Alanah Sarginson carefully captures the notions of place, time, connection and distance that are central to this issue as we delve into our relationships with the past.

"Nostalgia is such a strange, private, and bittersweet thing to navigate. I wanted to capture the different aspects of nostalgia, whether that's revisiting old feelings, experiences, or states of being entirely. Using different segments helped me to capture that, and by keeping it black and white I've been able to evoke the juxtaposition between the joyful naïvety of the past and the dimness and dullness that comes with growing older."

Alanah's cover perfectly conveys recurring themes throughout this issue. The black and white cover conveys how realities of our childhood can get lost in translation, morphing and shaping our interpretations of past experiences. Meanwhile, the bright block colours of the colour pieces mix with naïve, sudden textures that transport us to a state of simplicity - one we may yearn for in looking back for an escape from the complicated present. It brings me to the Welsh word hiraeth - a word, unmatched in English, that describes the painful longing for a place or thing that we once knew, an almighty homesickness. As you will read in the issue, these feelings of intense longing often come at a cost of forgetting bad to remember good. This spirit of questioning our relationship with memory is something the cover and its accompanying pieces captures perfectly - and we are so happy to have it resemble our issue.

Thanks so much to Alanah Sarginson for this illustration and for honouring our issue in such a great way! Whether to remain online or be immortalised in print, this is a piece I'm sure we will look back on in years to come.

Alanah is a first-year undergraduate student at LSE, studying BSc Philosophy, Logic and the Scientific Method. She grew up in Hertfordshire, having pursued her love for the arts and visual communication since childhood. In recent years, she'd begun exploring expression through colour, shape and pattern; formal elements that she wishes to express informally in their execution. She uses her studies in philosophy to reinforce her work, exploring themes of identity, experience and perspective. During her studies, she's designed and painted a mural for LSE Generate's common space in Sardinia House, as well as having her prints exhibited in the Saw Swee Hock building. Her most recent creative endeavour has been joining the multi-sensory collective The Radio Relay League, where she produces the artwork and animations for the house duo's tracks and socials.

Illustrations by Alanah Sarginson. Editorial by Rhydian Rolant Cleaver.