Virginia Woolf
Identity Series
This series reimagines three of Virginia Woolf’s most influential novels: The Waves, Mrs Dalloway and Orlando, through hand-crafted, analogue textures. Using identity as a constant across the series to reflect Woolf's themes and prose.
Reimagining Woolf
The Waves
The Waves is an iconic yet experimental work. Ambiguous and cryptic soliloquies spoken by six characters populate the novel, following each from childhood through to adulthood as they develop into fully realised individuals.
The soft lines of the silhouette reflect the identity shifts that define the book. The shifting blues of the watercolour background are given shape by the novel’s title and its reflective, fluid tone.
Mrs Dalloway
Set across a single day in London, the novel weaves the perspectives of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith into a fragmented meditation on memory, class, and time.
The silhouette captures Clarissa’s composed presence, still and self-contained against a wash of violet. The surrounding colour reflects the pressure of a busy, performative society that quietly threads itself through the novel.
Orlando
Orlando follows a single character across centuries, shifting gender, identity, and social position as they move through time. The novel plays with form, history, and performance, questioning how identity is shaped by those
around us.
The silhouette captures Orlando’s fluid presence, balanced within a textured green wash that suggests movement and transformation. The background reflects the novel’s playfulness and its refusal to settle into one version of self.
Process and Material
Each background began as a hand-painted watercolour, scanned and adapted to carry the tone and identity of each book.
The Waves
Mrs Dalloway
