After more than a decade of spontaneous mark-making, Two Pages is taking a new step forward. Two Pages Displays invites guest curators to dive into the archive and bring fresh perspectives to its ever-growing collection of creative exchanges.
The first Displays, Lincos by Carlos Romo-Melgar and Friends by Ellen Turnill Montoya, were unveiled at a special event at KesselsKramer in Shoreditch in February 2025.
The event brought together contributors, collaborators and curious minds for an evening of discussion moderated by Grace Bilney, a strategist and writer whose thoughtful questions helped bring the ideas behind the Displays to the surface. “It just feels like Two Pages is going to keep going,” Grace said during the talk. “It's a really special thing.”
The first two Displays offer markedly different but equally intimate reflections on the nature of communication, connection and creativity.
Carlos is a designer, educator and founding member of the design cooperative spreeeng. His curatorial approach to Displays was grounded in a desire to disconnect the works from context: no names, no locations, no keywords.
“That was because Two Pages has a really nice file system, where the names are at the very end,” he explained. “So unless you really want to look at the name of the designer, you can’t find it.” That freedom led him to select works that asked questions more than they offered answers. “I picked works that were asking me questions or asking me to see something… more like a collection of attempts to say something.”
Carlos is especially interested in miscommunication; what happens when design doesn’t spell things out, when intention and interpretation drift apart. “Some people think that they can design their way out of miscommunication,” he said. “But I believe that any form of communication always leaves space for interpretation. The audience has the capacity of projecting themselves onto the work.”
In a design world still often rooted in modernist ideals of clarity and control, Carlos embraces the messier bits. The works he selected embrace ambiguity and abstraction, expressions that sit on the edge of understanding. “I really appreciate designers when they know when to step back and leave some space,” he added. “I’m normally very drawn to this type of thing. Probably because I’m the opposite.”
If Carlos leaned into the cryptic, Ellen Turnill Montoya, creative director and performer (also known as Mr. Handsome, a giant hand), gravitated toward the emotional. Her Display, Friends, is a charming and intuitive parade of faces, characters and beings drawn from the archive. “As I was sorting out my selection, I realised the one folder that was getting bigger and bigger was the one that had all of these little characters and faces emerging,” she shared. “So, I decided to just follow my gut with that one.”
Gut instinct is central to Ellen’s creative process. It’s also something she’s spent her career learning to trust. “It definitely has been a real journey of feeling confident in my own personal gut and my own personal taste,” she said.
For Ellen, faces, however abstract, carry a universal pull. “That’s the first thing we recognise in the world as babies. It’s the first thing we can see clearly,” she explained, referencing pareidolia: our brain’s tendency to see faces in inanimate things. “Why do we see that as friendly? Why do we see that as scary? Why do we see that as silly? I just think that’s really interesting. And probably why I want to be friends with them all.”
Ellen’s Display also reflects her belief in the instinctive, often unconscious power of mark-making. “Sometimes I’ll sketch while something else is going on… and then I’ll see what I’ve sketched and it’s like, oh, that’s great. I quite like that! It’s almost like the other part of my brain took over.”
Like Carlos, she’s drawn to work that resists easy categorisation. Work that surprises, confuses or delights. “When somebody thinks in a way that you just cannot think… that’s my favourite thing,” she said. “When you can't work out how it was put together and you’re just like, wow.”
Though their approaches differ, Carlos and Ellen share a sense of curiosity and a deep appreciation for how Two Pages’ sketchbooks capture creativity in its rawest, most playful form. For both, the act of selecting work from the archive was less about hierarchy or authorship, and more about resonance.
Carlos describes Two Pages as “a little window to an intimate moment of a designer or an artist,” especially because contributors often use the format to escape the constraints of their commercial practice.
Grace touched on the physicality of the project in a world saturated with screens: “In a really digital world, something that’s physical and slow, and you have to wait for it, and then it’s with you in your hands… I think we lose that so much now.”
For Konstantinos Trichas, the founder of Two Pages, the beauty lies in not knowing where the sketchbooks or the ideas will go next: “It’s really nice to take the work outside of its natural habitat,” he said. “It’s exciting to see how these new kinds of connections and links emerge when you remove the original context. Whether it’s the city, the theme or the sketchbook itself.”
The start of something new
Two Pages Displays is only just getting started. “It gave a whole new meaning to the collection,” said Konstantinos. “A lot of works that I’d seen quite a lot of times, and some I didn’t really remember, suddenly became something new.”
With over 45 sketchbooks and 1,000+ contributions, the archive is vast. Displays offers a fresh way in: a chance to pause, reflect, and see through someone else’s eyes. And the door is open.
You can explore Friends and Lincos and discover your own unexpected connections, one spread at a time.