‘nine’ ‘sixty three’ is a tête-bêche (head-to-tail) book and contains the imaginative retelling of the nine years my beloved dachshund Bruno, spent in our home. The book contains two short stories consisting of events told from the perspectives of both Bruno and myself. The stories have each been printed back to back and upside down to each other, so as one is read, the book is flipped to read the other.

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My inclination towards dogs led me to spending majority of my time following local strays during my thesis, which in turn became my starting point into a greater exploration of mapping the transience of space and time; a ritual I continue to practice.

However, in contrast, the time I had with Bruno fleeted with the expectation that there was more to come. Unfortunately, on 1st January, 2019, I watched him wither away in my arms. After 48 continuous hours, of hugging, reheating and feeding him through a syringe, we watched him breathe a final sigh forever.

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He truly was family. I spent so long looking outside, I forgot to look in and the real change since graduation has been this persistent feeling of loss and regret upon his untimely passing.

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Anthropologist, Brian Hare’s ‘Domestication Hypothesis’ explains that by morphing into more socially acceptable companions, dogs in turn, are treated in a similar way to humans, by humans. Therefore, losing a pet is almost as hard as losing a human because that relationship, be it, with something that isn’t human, is still very much real and was in fact, a two-way bond.

‘nine’ ‘sixty three’ treads a design-oriented route, using hand drawn illustrations and typography to make Bruno’s tale all the more evocative and captivating.