On the twentieth anniversary of the launch of his first album cover for Radiohead, artist Stanley Donwood unveils a new direction in cover art; this time for the novels and collected stories of JG Ballard. Dream Cargo, named after one of Ballard’s short stories, includes 21 cover works and is timed to coincide with the sixth anniversary of the author’s death.

In 2012, Donwood received an email from Ballard’s publishers, 4th Estate asking if he would create cover art and design for 21 of the author’s works. The answer was yes. In Donwood’s words: "as Ballard is both arguably the finest and most peculiar novelist to work in English in the Twentieth Century, and perhaps my favourite writer, the outcome of that email was a foregone conclusion."

In producing the cover designs, Donwood acted as alchemist; working with scientists in their laboratories, using acids, combustion, X-rays, chromatography, and various other experimental techniques. Working with the instinct that JG Ballard regarded his writing as a sort of experiment itself, with his readers as the subjects, Donwood travelled to Cambridge to examine the laboratories at the University. There, he found himself in an underground bunker guarded by ‘warning - radiation’ symbols, observing extremely mysterious processes involving an enormous metal flask from which he was warned to keep well away. In another laboratory at Plymouth University, wearing a white coat and plastic goggles, Donwood saw explosions, combustions, rolling clouds of icy vapour and at the University of Bath he was shown 3D renderings of the interior of beehives, patterned images of neuronal connections and fluorescent microscopic bacteria. Inspired, Donwood carried out his own experiments with chromatographic paper clothes-pegged to wires strung about his kitchen, steeped in food dyes derived from coal tars.

For his work on Empire of the Sun – the novel inspired by Ballard’s boyhood internment in a Japanese prison camp - Donwood asked 4th Estate to obtain the rights for a photograph of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. As the artist says , “The nuclear flash of that bomb seemed to mark Ballard’s mind - it is mentioned in his creatively fictionalised ‘autobiographical’ work ‘Empire of the Sun’, and the sight of the birth of a new sun - of a new world - marks the end of Ballard’s childhood and the beginning of a genuinely new era. The Atomic Age had begun.”

On the collected works Donwood adds; “It’s one of my great regrets that I failed to take the opportunity to meet him before he died - I was too intimidated - but it’s my fond, if vain hope that he would have enjoyed my blundering progress through chemistry labs around the country, trying to capture rapid chemical reactions, to pin down the ephemeral and fix it to his surreal visions. I ended up with thousands of almost-identical photographs of various experiments, and dug deeply in the accumulated sediment of my own collected and unused artwork to create the covers for his books.”

A limited edition print of all 21 works will be presented for sale alongside smaller giclée editions of the book covers including all cover text.