I love a good clearout. I’m the daughter of an artist-designer who turned his own into an event – canvases would be ripped; pots smashed; bonfires piled high; work buried in the meadow at the end of the garden. One day, archaeologists will ponder the rituals that these might have been...
So why it took me so long to dispatch Dispatches from a Small World, my three-year, 648-drawing lockdown project reporting from my urban garden is a mystery.
Perhaps it was friends imploring me to keep it all. Or perhaps I thought I might rescue it from oblivion, when my work had long moved on. But my workspace is finite. I want it for present and future projects. So the two boxes of drawings went into four piles:
Edit: the 25% worth keeping because I had used it for products or it had other value;
Recycle, for sketches that were sideshows of the weeks’ blogposts and already drawn on the back of other work;
Develop: a handful kept to turn into large scale pieces;
Reuse: drawings that didn’t make it into the 'edit' or 'develop' piles, with clean paper on the back, now a fresh stash of drawing paper.
Goodness, that’s better!
Where clients’ processes allow, I use the same principles in design. In layout, it translates as using only the best pictures. In branding, it’s about reviewing as organisations change. And in signage, I once redesigned a brief from adding information to taking stuff away.
Done well, an edit gives ideas, information, even a bit of maximalism room to breathe.
