Island of Laputa

Helen Saunders was a member of the Vorticist group of artists, which formed in London under the leadership of Wyndham Lewis just prior to World War I. The Vorticists’ works were more abstract than anything made in Britain up to that time, and not until the mid-1930s would there be anything as remotely reliant on form and color alone in British art. But even the Vorticists included references to people and things in the general dynamic, mechanistic play of line and unmodulated color. In the black-and-white work by Saunders called Island of Laputa, for example, it is hard not to read a head, albeit machine-like in its forms, in the main shape rising up from the lower right of the composition. It seems to be derived from a figure hemmed in by the angular shapes of a surrounding city, speaking of what it feels like to live in an urban environment.