Howdy: Work makes you free

I’ve been in Germany for two months now, and this place rules?! Well thank fuck, because I was

looking over the edge before I came here, and now i’m just admiring the horizon. I’ve been working

my little titties off here, and now it’s time to use this blog as the archive in which it was intended.

playing with lights. very clean transition from colour to soft lighting here.

Working with Peter was a real game changer. He's painstakingly aware of his environment, constantly fiddling with the humidity, light levels, and arrangement. We worked together on a bar for their event space in an old barn. Peter and his wife, Silka are proper designers. They done did it at a high level. Silka is still professionally doing it. She said something to me that really stuck. We were talking about an introduction she had to do at her new job, and she was struggling with the presentation. She goes "what is there to say, It's like explaining a joke", boom! There is a real place for justifying design, and understanding why something is good. Done well, this inquiry into design is incredibly enlightening. But at the same time, half the fun is in just 'getting it'. Perhaps her comments speak to my recent spate of making for the sake of it. I've spoken about this before, but after Uni I was tired of ‘explaining the joke’ and so I just decided to churn work out. This is of course its own justification, and there was more to it than that. I also wanted to make for others. To finance this compulsion. And as of yet I haven’t found a project I have needed to justify. The things I've made these past few months have a relationship to the place and time in which they were made. I suppose their justification is in the story that is told alongside them.

wood block print made at Leepswood

Back to Peter and Silka. Damn they really listened. As I say real, proper, designers, who have done

really good work, and they gave a shit about what I had to say. I rate myself but I don’t expect anyone

else to, and it was so natural. No hierarchy, just discussion and implementation. And results!

Aesthetically those results didn’t blow me away, but the act of creation was one of the most

fulfilling I've experienced. The same is true here at the second workaway, building a firewall. I think it

has something to do with working for free? Again back to Peter and Silka, and to space and events.

Have I been ignorant to the pinnacle of human expression? The event. The party. The show. What's

more important than spectacle, what’s more exciting than giving each other the essential wrapped up

in the unexpected. Candles in trees, lights floating at night. Buildings wrapped in Fabric. Sound so hard

you literally shit yourself. I’m just riffing, but fuck me I wanna throw a party! What’s it like sitting down to

dinner and feeding the person to the left of you? What’s it like standing up to dinner? Even eating in the

dark. That used to sound so stupid to me, and I guess I wouldn’t start a business dedicated to it i’m glad

that someone did. In a world where it feels so difficult to change anything, exploring alternatives is truly

radical.

Plastic sheathing in the bar, really cool effect.

Speaking of alternatives, how about the 5th century. I spent the weekend at a living history event, which a younger version of myself would have certainly bullied me for. But here I am, fully grown, playing dress up as a medieval fabric trader. This was mainly an event for other fully grown adults to beat each other up with swords, but the handicraft aspect of this event was what blew me away. Not a machine stitch in sight. The lengths these people go to recreate the past is astounding, and the skill with which they do it is even more so. The atrophied part of my brain that still considers itself a designer, was seriously into this kind of experimental archaeology. A lot of the questions about how an object was used, or what it was used for, can be answered by recreating it with similar technology, and then just using it. Wild to think that we’re similar enough to a medieval person, that it seems in all likelihood that the way we use their objects now, is a direct replication of their own use patterns.