ABOUT

BRIEF
Design an exhibition, an installation, graphics for marketing and advertising and publication for poet, playwright and artist Liz Lochhead (then Scot’s Makar), as a conclusion to her year-long residency at Scotland Street School Museum, part of the Iconic People in Iconic Places project. This was to include poetry, drawing and painting made by Liz, objects from the museum’s store that resonated with her memories of childhood and school.

APPROACH
In collaboration with Sha Nazir, we developed a graphic design style using drawings from Liz’s portfolio of school children from her days at Glasgow School of Art.
Adopting the spontaneous and style of Liz’s drawings and the use of biographic memory to recreate the contexts of the artists educations at school and art school, to transport visitors back to different ages of teaching, learning, playing and punishment.

RESULT
We created a suite of marketing material that visually connected audiences with notions of their childhood, of nostalgia and of innocence and play.

We took influence form the style of teaching and schoolrooms that existed when Liz was at school herself and created an installation that put the visiting audience in that context. We hung Liz’s drawings, painting and poetry in the way a schoolteacher would hang their pupils and we curated tableaus of historical objects that reminded visitors of the material culture and attitudes that belonged to that era.