Look Build Question Repeat
Generating new meaning through sampling & context shifting.
I was raised watching my mother adapt thrift-store purchases into beautiful and useful household objects. An old parachute, transformed into slip-covers; a frock turned throw-pillow. I was especially attracted to the salvaged 1950s and 1960s photos and printed pieces she placed on our book shelves. Those materials, which have shaped my own design taste and style, were once only available at thrift stores and garage sales. Today, they are available online through an endless network of design inspiration blogs. Like me, this community finds inspiration in the past, but this process is risky. There is a danger of responses which lack substance, meaning, or transformation.
Sampling, adapting, and lifting images and forms from the past can create new meaning in the present day. Vintage images, graphic elements, and typographic styles are not empty forms. In addition to their aesthetic beauty and nostalgic charm, they carry inherent meaning, narratives, and histories. Through shifted context, fragmentation, and juxtaposition, they can be reintroduced to our culture in a fresh way. An original project can be developed from them, bearing new meaning and purpose.
In this body of work, fading images are repurposed poetically through a generative and adaptive process, involving participation by both designer and audience. Initiated by collection and reaction, this methodology embraces found materials as catalysts to making. It relies on graphic generation, association, and synthesis, followed by further graphic generation, association, and synthesis. Utilizing experimentation, momentum, and play, this process demands self-initiated projects which shift and change, question and answer, ramble and grow.
2010 RISD MFA Thesis, by Kate Harmer. Book includes projects "Pink, Yellow, Futura", "Field Manual for Creative Endeavors", "What Comes to Mind", and "Poetry of Logical Ideas". Perfect-bound paperback, 158 pages.