Designed artefacts, like the clothes and the hand made book placed within Como House, can be viewed as works in progress. They embody an idea or a perspective and are an initial outcome of a creative process. But the artefact in itself is only part of the equation.
A garment is only alive—no matter the craftsmanship or the material beauty—when it’s moving in conjunction with a body, or placed within a context that frames its desires. The form of a garment is not held purely within itself. Rather, it is the complex relationships between the garment, the wearer, the environment and the context in which it’s worn that gives it its final form. This final form, however, is a fleeting moment, as the contexts and relationships that set the form continually reconstruct it.
Part of the interest of designed artefacts or environments is in the contradictions that lie within them. While clothing needs us to give it form and context, we need and use clothing to do the same for us. Clothes help frame and shape our bodies and apply visual clues to our personalities, beliefs and persuasions. They allow us to understand each other and to associate with others around us. While Noble Rot displays the form of the stained and the worn, it also visualises and gives presence to the unknown stories and the lives that these garments have lived. It embodies a period of time and the socio-cultural practices and prejudices of the period.
The book made for the exhibition is a contradiction in form and content. Designed not to give description and fact, but rather to be a catalyst; to capture and give space to the stories, views and opinions of people that visit the exhibition. It was designed to be carried and used, to become a companion for visitors, a place for people to comment on the themes of Noble Rot. The book sits somewhere between being an object of beauty, a communal journal and a place of reference.
Being an object of beauty is its potential downfall, however. Unlike clothing, where people yearn to wear them, to have them encase their body and become a part of the fabric’s constructed beauty, books can suffer from the idea that they are precious.
That the words and marks within them are sacred, that they are not to be critiqued on the pages that they are rendered, but in heart felt discussion with others or in quiet contemplation with ourselves.
For a book to be part journal—a place of capture—it is detrimental for it to be viewed as a precious artefact. For a journal to function it needs to be used, to be handled and moved from place to place. With use, its form takes on a narrative of its own, much like clothing littered with sweat. The grease of hands and the marks they leave, the dog eared corners and creased spines serve to remind us that a book has had encounters and interactions with other people and places. It is these encounters and interactions that give the book its depth and shapes its form. Without these writings and additions, the book lies in stasis between its birth and death, a period of flux that renders it paralysed.
Just as clothing provides a structure and a form for our bodies and in return our bodies provide a stucture and form for clothing, layout and typography gives form and structure for texts and texts give form and structure to books. This book was designed with structures to help shape public response, such as ruled lines, empty spaces for potential images and blank pages free from the designer’s direction. It is the aesthetic of these structures that leads to its perceived beauty. But without these aesthetic expressions the book would have been a void, a confusing and confronting white space lacking idea or intrigue.