Bow Gamelan Ensemble Poster

Bow Gamelan Ensemble: Great Noises That Fill The Air Poster

Designed by James Brook for Cooper Gallery, Dundee, 2018

Poster | 420 x 297 mm

This is a poster I designed for Great Noises That Fill The Air, the first retrospective of influential artist collective Bow Gamelan Ensemble (Anne Bean, Paul Burwell and Richard Wilson) at the Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee. One of the curatorial ambitions for this exhibition is to ‘bridge a connection between Bow Gamelan Ensemble’s historical work and their ethos of collaboration, improvisation, conviviality and antagonism and our present moment’, so the brief for this poster was to ‘convey the liveliness of the collective’s practice through the activation of archives and not situate their work in the past’. I have created a bold layout using Industry Inc, a striking contemporary typeface designed by Mattox Shuler in 2014, alongside an image supplied by the artists. The poster was designed in a range of colour ways and was re-worked, at a smaller scale with different proportions, for an advert that appeared in Frieze magazine.

The exhibition runs from 26 October 2018 - 15 December 2018.
Click here to visit the Cooper Gallery website.

Ollie Dook: Of Landscape Immersion Book

Ollie Dook: Of Landscape Immersion

Edited by Claire Feeley

Published by Jupiter Artland, 2018

Designed by James Brook

ISBN 978 1 9164 8690 4

Softback | 130 x 195 mm | 48 pages
Printed in Wales by Gomer Press Ltd on 150gsm Munken Pure
with a cover of 320gsm Pop’Set 30% Recycled Lime Tonic

Of Landscape Immersion is Ollie Dook’s first outdoor work, created as part of Jupiter Artland’s programme to support emerging artists in the production of outdoor work. Focusing on the Jupiter Artland landscape, the animals and the parameters that house them, the artist has created a new work depicting the contained boundaries that form visitor experience. Reflecting on parallels shared in zoo enclosures, fabricated microclimates and imagery drawn from the BBC series Planet Earth, Dook has fabricated a sculptural enclosure that both mirrors our experience of observing natures forces whilst also positioning us – the audience – as a spectacle to be observed.

This limited-edition artist’s book is a record of Ollie Dook’s work, containing photographs of the installation at Jupiter Artland by Ruth Clark alongside essays by Nicky Wilson and Michael Lawrence, and an interview with the artist by curator, Claire Feeley. A major part of the book is an expanded illustrated essay explaining the concepts of landscape immersion by renowned zoo landscape designer Jon Coe.

Edinburgh Art Festival Commissions Programme Leaflets

Edinburgh Art Festival Commissions Programme Leaflets

Designed by James Brook for Edinburgh Art Festival, 2018

Set of 4 leaflets | 210 x 165 mm – flat size 210 x 492 mm | 6 pages roll folded
Printed by Allander, Edinburgh, on Cocoon Offset 160gsm

This is the fifth year that I have been invited to design printed material for the Edinburgh Art Festival’s Commissions Programme. This year, there was no over-riding theme that united the commissions so the Festival felt that a book was not appropriate, instead I was asked to design a series of interpretation leaflets that shared a common visual language. The brief was to create something open, clean and spacious with a wraparound front and back cover image for each leaflet. I added a coloured strip at the top of each leaflet to carry information about each commission: there were originally going to be different colours for each artist but were finally refined to a single shade of grey. The Art Festival suggested that I use a contemporary sans serif typeface so I typeset the leaflets in Aktiv Grotesk with minimal changes in size and style to keep the clean feel. The grid allowed for differences in layouts on the inside spread of each leaflet; this was decided by the images and copy supplied and from input from the individual artists. In order to maintain continuity with previous years, the size of the leaflet is the same as the last three books that I designed for the Festival; it is also printed on the same paper stock.

The Art Festival Commissions Programme supports Scottish and international artists to ‘develop ambitious new projects as part of the Festival. Our focus is on bringing artists into conversation with the city, taking work out of formal gallery settings and into public spaces, often offering rare public access to key buildings or sites, and always engaging local residents and international visitors alike in citywide debates around wider social issues’. The 2018 programme featured new work by Ross Birrell & David Harding, Ruth Ewan, Shilpa Gupta and Adam Lewis Jacob.

www.edinburghartfestival.com


Ross Birrell & David Harding: Triptych












Ruth Ewan: Sympathetic Magick












Shilpa Gupta: For, in your tongue, I cannot hide












Adam Lewis Jacob: No Easy Answers