The hand-drawn pages shown here are precise replicas of mass-produced, printed pages from Misadventure in the Middle East (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2007), Hemming’s first written book. In each artwork, what at first appears to be no more than a page from a book – a predominantly functional and mass-produced fraction of a whole that, by itself, is of little value – is in fact a meticulously drawn original work. There is an emphasis here on the imbalance between the 2 years it took to write this book and the six or seven hours it takes to read it. It also allows each page to read as an expressively and intricately composed work, something that has been made with precision and labour-intensive craft rather than machine-produced anonymity.

On a different level, the notes Hemming took during the journey that the book describes were made in pencil, on paper, and so the event of the journey performs a kind of cycle, distilled through memory: from hand-drawn page, to mass-produced printed page, and back again to hand-drawn page.