Huffer is just one of many notable New Zealand brands famed for pushing national motifs but sometimes produced elsewhere. This one example illustrates the precarious weight of a company’s desire for perpetual growth and a country’s desire to move forward. It raises the question of what this movement costs, who it benefits and invites debate into vague cultural references now synonymous with national pride/identity and the generation of capital; obscure placenames, the letters NZ, language-based colloquialisms and the peculiar geographical contour of two islands.

Created as an edition of 5.
Not for sale, but for donation.
All proceeds will go towards an award for year two fashion diploma students at Wintec.

Concept:
The concept behind this series has many facets. Challenging the premise that a poster is informational, this series removes the information and replaces it with a fictional city-narrative. Each narrative reflects on particular elements of the city and challenges the reader to reflect on their position and responsibility to their own surroundings. Using the common reference points of street, neighbourhood, city and countryside, each define themselves in reference to the other. If we are ‘here’ we are not ‘there’.

Not graphical in nature, these layouts use text as the medium. The message is not the story itself, but the issues embedded in it. Instead of calling out to a passerby, these posters require engagement; the reader will have to pause to read. In addition to this investment, these posters are meant to cause the reader to seek out the other posters from the series, rediscovering their urban landscape along the way.

In addition, these posters are printed on the front and back; English on one side and French on the other. In this manner I hope to reveal that, although I am a native English speaker, the French translations on the other side truly reflect and mirror my intention.

Just as under the surface, the characteristics of people and their towns are all very similar.

Surely I must be out of practice. Here’s to a new year and a new endeavor. 

There is perhaps nothing that we exchange more as tangible objects than currency.

For the first 6 years of my life my family lived in a suburban neighborhood, complete with two cul-de-sacs. In our neighborhood lived a woman who saved up pennies throughout the year and offered them up by handfuls to children each Halloween. I’m sure it could never have been more than 20 cents to a small 5 year old hand, but 20 was more than I had had when I set out. Unlike the bag of treats I’d tote around the rest of the evening, the peanut butter black and orange or the Hershey’s Special Dark which I detested, I could trade the 20 cents in for sweets that I actually wanted; there was still a dime store.

The toothfairy was comparable; it moved me from copper with its miniscule Lincoln sitting in his monument into silver. The complex ability to conceive that something the size of a quarter held just as much promise as 25 copper pieces, and to marvel that a dime is even smaller than a penny!

Receiving money was an annual event. Each year a birthday card from my grandmother would include a five-dollar bill. A five-dollar bill as an eight-year-old was seemingly incomprehensible, whereas a five-dollar bill to an 18 year old became more like a cherished object from a grandmother who wouldn’t be around much longer; I even stopped spending them. Their worth as an object subsumed their monetary worth like the bicentennial quarters that are worth more than 25 cents and the strange 2 dollar bills which no one seems to know what to do with.

Somewhere around my early teens, was the first Christmas that I received a hundred dollar bill in lieu of gifts from my dad. It wasn’t a gesture of his not being able to come up with an idea for a gift (though I’m sure that had something to do with ease), but it was a perfect gift. Having a hundred dollar bill made me wonder if anything could be so important or needed as to break it up into pieces where every fragment becomes more apt to be spent.

Living for awhile in Antwerp, Belgium, in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, it took me awhile to realize that I was to offer my money on the tray set out for me on the counter and then expect it back in the same manner; contactless. In New Zealand the paper money is plastic; it doesn’t keep a fold well, melts and shrinks if heated and is seemingly another step away from real. In terms of worth however, it is just as abstract as the pulpy variety. On a recent trip to Japan I marveled at their presenting change to me formally, with both hands, as if what I was being returned was somehow special or a gesture instead of something that I was owed. There are significant moments around this exchange; at a drive-through window where fingers and palms touch, or where wishes are made at a fountain or a well or where luck begins by finding coins on the ground.

Paper currency, so very intricate visually, is dulled by use. Not dulled in the sense of the imagery losing its crispness or the loss of meaning, but dulled in the sense that the design becomes bland and ordinary, commonplace. There is such an absentminded trust at work when utilizing the currency of our day to day lives that when traveling, there is always a moment back in the hotel room where I empty my pockets, sit on the side of the bed and look at what I’ve been spending. Fanning out the often multi-colored bills, I marvel at the fine lines, the micro-printing, the watermarks, the engraved famous face captured in a particular way, the language used, the denomination and attempt to translate that amount back into something familiar. I reduce the appealing design back into my comforting dull. Attempting to do, what I did as a child; make a dime worth more than a penny.

In addition to this text, designs for new international currency denominations done by students from my second-year integration graphic’s class were submitted.

Perhaps we can make a deal.
Two explorers;
Head lamps, pup-tent,
Sleeping bags suitable for wide-ranging temperatures,
Water supply, freeze-dried meals,
Astronaut ice-cream (a novelty),
Notebooks, writing utensils,
A very analogue camera
(who knows when we will will find another power supply?)
Flares (in case of emergency along with a silvery blanket)
Chop-sticks (easier than forks!)
Spoons and multi-use tool (includes a knife)
Camping stove and non-stick cookware,
Unbranded head-ache tablets and at least two antihistamines,
Girl/girl (boy) guide survival book,
Compass,
Crank radio with lamp,
Citronella candles and all-weather matches,
A lighter (as backup)
A few extra changes of underwear,
Christmas binoculars…

The obvious missing supply is the map.
There is no map.
It was once charted territory,
but since the earth shook
and time passed,
It’s altogether different.
The compass only points in one direction.
That means something.

It’s almost as if in the previous charting,
the world was flat, and now it’s round.
Or previously drawn with pencil and now it has the possibility of relief. (tactile)
Let’s forgive each other if we ask questions,
Forgot (or never knew) directions,
Linger at undiscovered places,
Navigate sometimes with naive abandon (out of confidence)
Only to backtrack and move more slowly
Sometimes hesitant,
Sometimes exhausted,
Sometimes drunk with optimism and exhilaration
That this is my/your territory,
And no one else’s.

I can enter the question like a roundabout
indicator on, but still driving
this exit, no this one
then compromise, ‘I like them all’

Surely there is an indication
preference
it clicks repeatedly, the dash-lamp flashes
yellow, orange or red
a warm colour

But what of coolness?
Scarves, mittens, halos of breath
ice-scraping with credit-cards

no one hand-knits something summery,
to be cherished in a season
known for taking off instead of layering

like brown gravy with mashed potatoes or biscuits
with cream gravy, flakes of black pepper
at breakfast
in that new light we all cherish
reminiscent of that curly energy-saving-bulb
light

which under shade,
reminds me of once following the shadows of clouds
across a knee-high grass hillside
but for the life of me
I can’t remember if it took place in summer
or autumn.

Concept:
An Impression of My Mother began as a keepsake. My mother collects magazine and newspaper snippets, bank statements, social security envelopes, newspaper cartoons, birthday cards and sends them to me in bulk; new diet tonics, poems, bible verses, small puzzle books, photos of my cousin’s children, obituaries, current editions of my high school newspaper, etc. Occasionally she annotates things with yellow sticky-notes and handwritten points of reference and often she doesn’t. Sometimes it’s a box.

Part of this need to hold on to this artefact of my mother is my parent’s ages, which means it is also my age. During the years of absence between the times we see each other off or greet each other at an airport, we age significantly. We miss hundreds of chances for lunches and get-togethers. Which leads me to sometimes wish they lived in Sydney or Wellington, even as close as a small farm on the other side of Te Awamutu, which is closer than 12578 kilometres.

It’s similar to a vivid memory that once occurred physically and now can only be remembered. These scraps of paper are objects full of recognition and identity; from the inscription itself and the place that signatures hold in our society, to the name and its genealogy continually working backwards and forwards. There is something about the bruising of the layers of paper and how they each captured the pressure of her fingers; something so human and fragile in the way the letters were formed. The darkest one holds the ink itself, the pen that responded to the movements of her hand and the lightest one captures just enough to faintly hold the strokes.

It began as a keepsake, cherished; a form of memory that I carry with me.

Concept:
The wall on Anglesea Street in Hamilton is a large concrete retaining wall stained with dampness; the only relief being a mid-day sun that doesn’t always shine.

Behind this wall there is land and beyond those buildings there is a river. The text itself forces a dialogue about two of New Zealand’s primary controversial features, land and water, but is condensed in scale from country to region to city. The wall is something truly iconic but without many features, a retaining wall slicing through a hillside that is rented instead of owned, to the Waikato Institute of Technology, by the local Waikato-Tainui people.

The wall on Anglesea Street is a constant testimony of the city’s back to the river and silently gives evidence of the passage of time. There is little doubt that its creation would not be duplicated today and should not be duplicated tomorrow. Instead, Anglesea Street would go around. The Telecom, Hamilton City Council buildings, the native bird mural and Caro Street office building would all be housed elsewhere. Perhaps Garden place would include more garden.

Using the wall as a reference point, the text both states the obvious and expresses disappointment. It is a statement which, when viewed by those familiar to its location, will linger as they pass the literal scene; blank but for the pressure-washed light sections of concrete, blank against an often eerily empty street, blank because of both its function and prominence in a city with a hill and a river.

“The ______ of today is that I am aware that you exist.”
The subject of the brief was to develop a poster that discussed the notion of the world ‘shrinking’. In my typographic submission, I attempted to put forward the idea that the shrinkage is at times beautiful, often alarming and still occasional awes us. Regardless of how we view the shrinking world, the nature of it forces us into living with awareness and responsibility.

These were printed locally as large-format photocopies, with the original design created on the back of a Powerpoint printout which is faintly visible in digital versions of the poster. Five copies were sent in all, one as the submission, and four as posters that the event coordinators could share with organisations or post up in places where they felt it would be suitable.