We are happy to announce our third guest for VCFA’s October residency in the MFA Graphic Design program: the inestimable Gail Swanlund!
Gail Swanlund is a graphic designer and writer whose home is in Los Angeles. Her typographic-image works reside in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Getty, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and her work has been exhibited around the world. Gail has worked closely with book collaborators and artists Laura Owens, Jennifer Steinkamp (in collaboration with Geoff Kaplan), Edgar Arcineaux, Harry Dodge, Haegue Yang, Benjamin Weissman and poet Amy Gerstler. Gail is a member of the faculty in the Art School’s Graphic Design program at CalArts.
Chair Ian Lynam sits down with Gail to get the scoop on what she’s been up to as of late…
Spreads from “Shovel” Reader #6, in a series of ten readers. Stencil printed booklet, 16pp, edition of 100.
This project is part of http://tenreaders.com, a loose collective of designers: Willem Henri Lucas, Jessica Wen-Di Tan, Johanna Hedva, Brian Roettinger, Jon Gacnik and myself. Each of us makes an edition of 100 booklets for the project; we meet up, package and release a bundle of six readers for six bucks, twice a year. Essential to the project is a pre-Reader dinner together, so our friendship is as important and integral as the making and distributing. At the start, we decided on committing to ten readers, and in doing so loosely bound us together for five years. Next year, we’ll release Reader #10. Plans for the next project (of ten more things?) are under consideration
What is it that drives you to write, as well as design?
Writing can be a way to delve into, develop or embellish an idea. The process of writing can help transform ideas into the visual. It’s about approaching something from more than one direction. And since the concept, the ultimate driver of form, has been elaborated in multiple ways, the potential for visual inquiry, or a certain kind of wildness, is opened up. I don’t mean that the idea becomes clearly defined or explained—for me that would be immobilizing—but to put it another way, writing can give an idea mass and weight; summoning words around and about something gives me a surface to push against.
Writing makes it possible to carry out sustained investigations too, to revisit ideas, try something out in another way. I love being able to make a “thing” in its entirety too. Writing gives me more control in a process that isn’t always smooth or straight or clean.
Identity system design for the performance collective, Highland Art Agents. This identity is made up of several components that are assembled in real time and as needed. Identity constructions prepared in advance for the group include a website, working radio station and station identifier, ring tone, opera stage, uniforms, plush toy mascot, mobile unit, letterhead and business cards.
Are these practices things that happen in tandem?
Tandem is a nice word for this method of working. It’s not quite the same as being ambidextrous, of being able to use either hand to the same level of proficiency. “Tandem” sounds like a weird contraption, which is an accurate analogy for the way in which the two activities shove and drag and drive whatever is being made, and not always in equal measures of time or energy.
Typically, for me, there’s a flurry of writing up front before working on the visual form. Some ideas require research and a devoting time to writing into the subject deeply. Or the idea may be fleeting and speculative, so being able to note even a fragment of a thought can be exceedingly useful. Editing and rewriting—verbally and visually—happen continuously and steadily throughout the process. There are also moments of literally walking away; which is as important as the time spent engaged at the machine or table. Going outside and walking around loosens words, associations, and sometimes images. I frequently forget that getting some distance is an integral part of the writing-designing process; I need to be reminded.
Ed Fella, “I’m History” poster, offset. Typeface design by Sybille Hagmann.
This poster was designed to commemorate an exhibition of Ed Fella’s flyers and Counterfactual History project. This poster resides in a continuum of an ongoing project I began when I was one of Ed’s students.
The word on the street is that you occasionally convene with the spirit world. What’s the story?
I’m on the board of the design-research organization DesignInquiry (DI). Each summer, DI holds a weeklong design event on an island off the coast of Maine. Half of the group stays in a reputedly haunted farmhouse during the time we are there. Over the years, several inexplicable incidents have reportedly occurred in the farmhouse, and one room in particular is referred to as “The Ghost Room.” Frankly, in that room after dark, it’s kind of spooky to grope around for a light.
Rather than conducting some sort of paranormal investigation (and personally, I’m not too keen on bothering ghosts or making them prove their existence; I’m a ghost agnostic), a team of DesignInquirers came together with the intent of inviting whatever resident ghosts who may be around to collaborate with us in making drawings, through the use of simple ad-hoc drawing machines made from whatever was at hand. The drawing machines aren’t an attempt at some kind of corroboration, or to confirm a supernatural hand caused a painting to launched itself off a wall and land upside-down on the other side of an empty room, among other strange events, but instead a kind of low-energy metaphoric improv through which the (alive and otherwise) participants could create moments of off-subject invention and zero in on subtle shifts in natural systems. Plus there were a few successful ghost drawings. It’s an on-going project.
Local quarry rock, fishing hooks, and kitchen implements are integral to the construction of various ghost drawing-assist machines prototypes.
http://designinquiry.net/contributions/collaborating-with-ghosts-to-draw-and-write/
Your graphic design work shows a heavy emphasis of analog-based making alongside digital making. What are reasons that you would espouse for contemporary designers to bring the hand into their work?
Both ways of working are intrinsic to making, and are productive means. The ability to magnify onscreen, seemingly endlessly, to peer at the tiniest of details—even if the minutiae isn’t evident in the results—is kind of magical. Being able to effortlessly multiply, iterate, test, change ad infinitum, or push something to be numerically precise or effortlessly apply effects is fantastic too. Working analog, the hand and physical materials make distinctive marks that the machine really can’t really replicate or make, and the tools are obviously in human scale and space. And it’s easy to work absolutely anywhere. I like to draw on paper as much as I do onscreen, and then it’s natural to throw everything together, redraw, chop everything up, encourage the bits to ferment or construct new associations and juxtapositions.
Cover art for Amy Gerstler’s book, “Scattered at Sea.” Cover design is by Jason Ramirez.
Who are your heroes and heroines?
Planned Parenthood. 5 Gyres.
I have a list, too, of individuals whose person and work inspire me; people whose work is courageous, or quietly and inherently political, and/or hold down a tiny corner of the world in a way that keeps me from despairing about its fate: Amy Gerstler, Maria Bamford, Haifaa Al Mansour, Maggie Nelson.
“Colossal,” serigraph series, printed by Maggie Lomeli, http://grayareaprint.com
Who are the opposite?
Ha! Nice try.
“Los Angeles County Hall of Records,” Machine Project Field Guide to L.A. Architecture, serigraph, printed by Paul Morgan http://paul.cretin.net
Who is grey?
We all are kind of grey in a way. Greyness is a state that many of us find ourselves in frequently. It’s not a negative state of being; one needs to make peace with the greyness and grant the time to let it be something so that it can give sustenance to the other parts of one’s life in important ways.
Thanks so much, Gail! We are very much looking forward to spending time with you at residency in October!
Stay tuned for the next installment of “Huh?”, coming soon! trace affiliate link | Nike Off-White
