This past weekend was one of those experiences that “builds character.” Like when your dad makes you cancel your weekend plans to teach you how to build a fire or change a tire. There’s a million other things you’d rather be doing, the process is irritating, but at the end of it you’ve learned something. Not just a new skill necessarily, but a new way of looking at problem solving that you’ll take with you for the rest of your life.
The entire sophomore class of graphic designers taking Type 2 were part of a weekend long workshop with visiting designers Keetra Dean Dixon and Ben Van Dyke. Their work is very tactile and engages the viewer to interact with the work in physical space. This is a pretty big departure from what most graphic designers consider “typography.” Most of what we do is organizing letterforms on two dimensional surfaces, whether they be screen, paper, or wall. This workshop was set up to push us out of that, and to rejuvenate how we think about the design of letters and the meaning of words.
After two great lectures we were told to get into groups of seven and to come up with a word that exemplifies our group. After our word is chosen we were charged with doing a series of material studies and type studies to find materials and letterforms that inform the word and to finally produce an installation that speaks to the personality of the group. Getting seven creative people to agree on anything is a challenge. It’s a bigger challenge outside of the professional environment when there’s an established hierarchy. But luckily there wasn’t a lot of head butting to be the leader of the group and any disagreements we had were part of a really productive discourse in looking for the best direction to take the project.
With the groups established we went our separate ways to talk about the project and to decide on our word. In talking with the group we discussed what brought each of us to graphic design, and more specifically to RISD’s graphic design program. We were all very interested in structure. Creating order and systems in our work was something everyone else was excited in, and something that I’ve definitely felt was lacking in my work and was a major part in my decision to go back to school. Our conversation turned to what structure really meant and what about that word was interesting to us. A list of adjectives was created we discussed them for awhile until we decided we were really intrigued with the fragility of structure. There’s something poetic about all the work that goes into creating a complicated building, and in seconds it can all come down. Our conversation helped me realize that structure is more than a grid, it’s a series of agreements.
In order for complicated systems to work together, each element needs to agree to do its job. The role in the structure needs to be accepted and the relationship must be nourished for the structure to succeed. A family is a structure, an economy, a country, are all systems with complex inner workings and complex relationships. A family’s structure can be brought down with the act of adultery, an economy can collapse with a stock market plunge. This set of relationships is what we wanted to explore in our installation.
In discussing materials that had complex relationships we kept coming back to the egg. The shell is hard, and contains and protects the yolk inside from outside interference, but it’s also meant to be broken when the embryo is mature enough to interact with the outside world. As a result the egg shell itself is a structure that can fail instantly. We wanted to illustrate our concept with wire letters that would house the eggs and suspend from the ceiling. The mesh and the egg share a visual language of the farm, and the addition of form and suspending them in a precarious position would be a welcome way to illustrate all the complex relationships in our piece (yolk to shell, egg to mesh, mesh to wire, wire to line, line to ceiling). After this drawing one of the group members noted that they looked just like the wire letters that Urban Outfitters sells and that they would probably be less expensive than the material required to make them (not to mention all the time involved). We purchased the letters, and a ton of mesh and got to work.
Cutting the mesh to size and then crimping it around the iron structure was tedious and resulted in a ton of nasty cuts on our fingers, thankfully our word was only nine letters long so we were all able to construct one much quicker than if someone was doing this project alone.
After the initial layers were attached we filled the letters with about 12 dozen eggs and closed it up.
Hanging posed some problems, but we found a nice little space that housed the letters well and allowed the viewers to walk through the piece itself.
The project was tough and the weekend was full of blood and sweat (seriously, we cut up our fingers on that wire, and those hooks were pretty tough to hang). But the process was super inspiring, and the reaction to the piece was priceless.
