Telling Tales: Fantasy & Fear in Contemporary Design

[Gareth Williams, Curator, Telling Tales]
Telling Tales has objects by people who trained as industrial designers, generally speaking or product designers rather than as fine artists, but here we see them using their design training to create pieces which are really more symbolic than they are functional often, or which are very decorative. They’re not prototypes for mass production, but they’re more like personal statements.

Since the 1990s there’s been a strong interest in the sort of conceptual value of design and designers have learned to act very independently and to think very independently and to make personal manifesto statement pieces rather like artists may make their own personal works. I particularly chose works for this exhibition which seemed to have some kind of narrative content or references to history, or in this particular room where we’re standing, references to fairy stories, or more kind of general, universal stories.
Why do designers go back to this kind of content?
Well I think that they realise that design works are able to carry an awful lot of meaning and that they can communicate very well as design objects because we read them as the functionality of it, we understand it in some kind of fundamental way, and people can be touched by the content of these universal truths I suppose.  

[Job Smeets]
And he started off, he just thought that he didn’t want to be in line of all the producers hoping that he could produce an industrial product for them. The only thing we wanted to be was as free as possible in a creative way, so not linked and not limited to production processes and not to the market and not to clients, not to commercial aspects. Just only to be dependent on your own mind, to be the curator of your own mind.

Nick and I thought that it would be kind of funny to imagine ourselves and let’s say (in) an office of a very bad person, you know a person who makes the money of over the backs of the poor.
I think they’re kind of satirical, yes, but also that doesn’t mean that satirical can’t be beautiful. I think they’re also, they also have a sculptural quality which is very important to our work.

[Kelly McCallum]
For me it’s using certain techniques or using certain sort of craft is a way of getting across, as you said, a story and having people look at objects in a new way. For me, because I’ve always been inspired by these specific objects it’s about looking at their story and sometimes creating stories about them and then telling those stories to other people.

I found this old fox and its ears were already very broken and disintegrating, and it was the damage that it had already sustained through its life as an object that inspired me to sort of create the idea of the golden maggot. For me it’s a lot about the process of life and death and not looking at maggots as a sort of disgusting creature, which is how they’re usually viewed, and by recreating them in gold it gives them sort of a new life and a new way of looking at them.

[Tord Boontje]
We work in this context of design, industrial design, which has kind of been hijacked by a minimalist agenda, which stylistically is very strong but in terms of content very meaningless. And I think just like myself there are other people who kind a felt that there’s something missing in that, we want these things to relate to our life, how we see the world and where did the common expressions for our mood.

Around here, 2000, 2001, I became very interested in the whole idea of decoration, I realised that this was something that as designers gone through industrial design, art school, decoration is something we are automatically thought not to do and I kind of started to realise, well why not? And there’s something very interesting there. I started to look at pre-industrial revolution design and much more handmade craft products and I actually spent a lot of time here in the Victoria and Albert Museum, going through the embroidery collection, looking at metalwork, wood carving, and I really realised that there’s something of a sensuality that we have lost in this very bland world that we live in. I want to create something much richer, also more narrative and story telling in that sense.

[Gareth Williams, Curator, Telling Tales]
Well there is a term that’s been around for a few years now describing this kind of work as design art. I think it’s a very contentious term and not really a term that I particularly like because it’s very loaded. But I think, what we have here is a group of designers who appear to be acting rather like artists, and certainly with a similar kind of ambition as contemporary artists, but I really do think these are works of design first and foremost.

[Kelly McCallum]
I think that this type of work has really hit the forefront now, possibly because people are interested in having objects that are more interesting than just everyday design pieces. They want things that are artistic and more conceptual, but still are things that they can live with and experience on a day to day life.

[Jurgen Bey]
This whole notion about design art, for me it does not exist. I am a product designer, I’m trained to be a product designer and that’s what I do. I don’t believe that I’m an artist, I still have like other ideas about an artist who is digging, asking questions to the world, I would almost say like an elementary scientist.

[Tord Boontje]
The notion of design art is very irrelevant to me. I myself see these pieces which are on the high price class and what I do in my studio, much more experiments that will lead to production ideas, and I think it’s actually quite dangerous to start to take this design art market as something completely serious.

[Job Smeets]
So in the end it will always be a selective area, and that’s a good thing I think because you don’t need this all over the world. Can you imagine if all the designers in the world start now to make unique pieces and this kind of expressive pieces. Tomorrow you wouldn’t even be able to go on the cap anymore.

[Gareth Williams, Curator, Telling Tales]
I think underlying all of the content in the exhibition is a certain ambiguity and a feeling of uncertainty, so even when we’re in the forest glade in this kind of childlike innocence that’s still undercut by a sense of threat or double meaning, so it’s shifting sands isn’t it. I think there is a sense of uncertainty, perhaps that’s what the designers in the exhibition are telling us about our own times, that we’re in shifting times and there are no certainties any longer.