‘Is This Anything?’ is a 2020 collection from Jerry Seinfeld that acts not only as a complete file of the comedian’s jokes, riffs and stories, but also an autobiography, told as it is in sequence of their creation. Seinfeld explains the book’s title as a persistent plea backstage at thousands of gigs and bars, scrap of paper in hand, asking peers if the collected chicken scratches presented (in his case, on the same yellow lined paper) amount to anything funny. Or, if Seinfeld had grown up in Northern England, ‘owt funny’.

“Ideas that come from nowhere and mean nothing”.

Is This Owt collects bits and bobs, odds and ends, that come from a chronic need for visual communication. The work presented is often created in the gaps afforded by a full-time job and a four-hour commute (round trip, I’m not insane). Unlike Seinfeld’s book, the work isn’t quite presented in sequence of its making (a chaotic approach to my own archive won’t allow it). However, as best as I can manage, the work is presented as close as possible to its birth date, so the reader can come along with me as I get hung up on an Everyday comics trip for weeks on end, or when a period of decent weather aligns with a free weekend, and I can get a good run up at some impromptu sculpture from fly-tipped materials.

My last book length work proper was 2021’s You Can’t Draw the Same Tree Twice (still available from all good boxes under my bed). The answer to ‘is this owt’ isn’t always answered herein, and book length works seem out of reach in 2024. Some riffs have become screenprints, as evidenced in this edition’s opener, ‘Katell surfing in Devon’, while most of the book remains as brief efforts recording the Everyday of an everyman, albeit one with a perversion for black marker pens.

I present my process and ask, clipboard in hand, ‘is this owt?”

Oliver East, May 2024