Try me
It’s great to get to work with people who really know their craft. Specialists have insights into their disciplines and a store of knowledge that I find very enviable, speaking as a generalist and a bit of a dabbler. It’s great to see how they approach solving a creative problem and how that might differ from the way you would do it. The other way in which you can learn a great deal from them is to work collaboratively with them, rather than just asking them to work to a brief.
Last year I had the pleasure to work with writer Therese Kieran on a project called 26 Lies. Twenty six writers were paired with twenty six artists and designers, each responding to lie supplied to us by the organisers. Ours was “Regular use significantly reduces body size.”—a line from a withdrawn ad for Nivea Bio-slim lotion. It was great to collaborate with Therese, seeing how her thinking evolved and working together to capture something of the spirit of it in the final visual piece. From her first exploration it was clear that themes of body image, transformation, illusion and reality were going to be important and they seemed to lead very naturally to Alice. A rabbit-hole that Therese has lots of fun exploring.
Therese started with a wonderful long piece but as things progressed we thought it would be interesting to look at a version that was much more condensed, this was the result:
go on, try me
daily,
no really, you’ll see
I’m the real deal
and soon you’ll be feeling great –
don’t wait,
nothing can reduce you like I do,
no low-fat plan can sculpt you like I can;
I’m sweet, a treat,
inedible but oh so very spreadable
and I’ll take inches
here and there, I swear,
just rub me in –
you’ll soon
be feeling
pretty
thin
From pretty early on, as the shorter written piece developed it became clear that setting the text, rather than trying to illustrate it with a different image was the way we wanted to go. We looked at The Mouse’s Tale from Alice in Wonderland — it’s a concrete poem (where the arrangement of the words plays on the meaning of the text) and decided we would steal it… We shaped Therese’s words into a woman’s silhouette while retaining a similar ending to tale.
By this stage we had a pretty strong idea of how we wanted to set the text, but had yet to resolve how to present it for the exhibition. We hit upon the idea of using a mirror as it refers to Alice’s looking glass world and gives a context for thinking about body image and body dysmorphia. It was also an obvious way to display a human figure. I looked to see if I could source one that felt right for the period of Alice, something rich and ornate. We found one which was made out of plaster and painted black—we both loved it and realised that it would be lovely to create a black mirror. The matte black of the frame would contrast nicely with a high gloss black ‘mirror’, it would also feel a bit occult and mysterious.
The finished piece was shown at the Free Word Centre alongside work from lots of interesting people including Jack Renwick Studio, and Baxter and Bailey.
I really enjoyed being part in this project and getting to know a writer by working with them. It’s something I’d recommend to any designer or artist with even a passing interest in words.
