Stephanie Lynch (she/her)
Within my practice I find myself making, animating and researching. Throughout my work, there is often a focus on community, humour and human experience. The main project, Wander about the Highland games, I have presented ticks all of these boxes.
Wander About the Highland games
The given brief for this project was to curate and design an identity for an online festival. The brief questions how one could capture the colour, noise and atmosphere of a festival such as the Notting Hill Carnival in order to create a digital experience. I was given the option to create my own festival or to choose an existing one.
The aspect of the brief that interested me the most was the challenge to recreate the feeling and atmosphere of being at a festival or event. I thought about the types of festivals or outdoor events I have been to and I felt it would be exciting to try to recreate the experience of being at a local festival such as The Highland Games. My target audience is the many people who regularly attend these local games across the country, who are missing out as all of the games had been cancelled for 2020 and much of 2021.
Aircraft Safety Card Collectors Anonymous (ASCCA)
The aircraft safety card, a document found in the seat pocket of every chair, in every aeroplane. Most people have a glance over it, put it back and forget about as soon as they get off their flight. However, as I soon found out, not everyone. I discovered there actually is a whole community of people who dedicate their lives to collecting, organising, buying, selling and trading these aircraft safety cards. Some of these collections include up to 12,000 safety cards from hundreds of different airlines. I set myself a brief that would allow me to dive into the community, figure out what it was all about and then how to communicate this to an audience.
In order to get an insight into the community, I started researching how these collectors operate. This leads me to emailing collectors, searching trading websites and joining social media groups. I then made the first step towards becoming a safety card collector and purchased my first card off of Ebay. This allowed me to actually become a part of this weird and wonderful community. The response I got as I introduced myself as a new member of the group was overwhelmingly positive with many people offering to send me spare safety cards to help me build my collection! One of the members compared this to “drug pushing”, and this is what sparked the idea for the rest of the project.
The comparison of a niche hobby such as safety card collecting to the extreme drug world is over-exaggerated, yet strangely accurate once you start seeing the parallels between the two. Using the hyperbole of safety card addiction, to visualise what it would look like if this hobby was treated as a serious problem in a society like the drug industry. Re-contextualising in order to explore what it might look like if there was campaigning against safety card collecting or what rehabilitation groups may look like. I have presented here a few world-building images that visualise this.
Aircraft Safety Card Collectors Anonymous (ASCCA) is a fabricated addiction support group that applies recovery techniques to help safety card collectors. I used this group to help with the world-building around the safety card addiction.
Penguin Book Cover
For this project, I decided to allow myself just to have fun and do some visual play, rather than getting myself too bogged down on researching the book. My initial thought when I considered the concept “the inhabitable earth” was of how the environment change would affect animal as their own natural habitat changed. This leads me to consider what it might look like to have animals swapping habitats such as a lion on an ice cap or a penguin in a desert. I enjoyed letting myself be playful and create some silly imagery of what a penguin might have to wear if the climate got too warm or too cold for him. I then developed some of these initial ideas into a book cover. I found that the subtlety of keeping the original cover the same or very similar, with a simple, muted background, and having one small focal point, gives the small detail of a toasted penguin much more weight.
Future Museum
The brief was to consider what the future of museums may be and create a response that would benefit this future museum in some way.
This project started off very research-heavy as I was interested in a few aspects of the future of museums. I began by researching how collections are usually curated. This is often done by one person who’s job is to create an interesting exhibition that shows off the best aspects of the artefacts and artwork they have available. I find this quite interesting as it often means the exhibition is framed from one person’s point of view, who has the opportunity to tell you what they think is of importance. This lead me to consider how a museum may be curated in the future. In the days where there is a focus on personalisation and efficiency, it seems the clear next step for museums is to allow the viewer to curate their own experience from home. This control would allow the user to find things they instantly are attracted to rather than having to spend their limited time searching through exhibitions to find something they might like. The need for instant gratification is prevalent in today’s society so it’s not hard to believe there will be a time when museum visits are done completely virtually rather than ‘wasting time’ going to experience them in person.
Second Hand Cinema
For my typography project, I decided to explore the idea of a socially distant cinema and what the closest thing to a cinematic experience at home would be. As with the vast amount of streaming services available, it’s easy to take watching a film at home for granted when there is an abundance of things to choose from. To recreate the excitement of choosing a film, I started buying DVDs from second-hand shops. Having this physical experience brings back the nostalgia of getting to pick a film at Blockbuster and changes the attitude you have towards the film and the amount of respect you are willing to give it.
For my publication, I wanted to create something that gives back respect to the films that have made their way to a second-hand shop and are now going to be given the attention you would give to a film you’ve paid to see in the cinema. During this project, I mainly focus on improving my typographic skills and create a clean, classic layout that isn’t focused on trying to be gimmicky or say too much.
This is an ongoing project that would be realised as an insert in a magazine.
