Studio on the road: Bourden Street Chippy
The creative team get crafty, and discover a love for a fuzzy, felty ‘slice of life’.
Love letters to the everyday
The creative team get crafty, and discover a love for a fuzzy, felty ‘slice of life’.
Last week the studio at D4R closed so that the team could have some well-deserved time away from screens to get inspired in the real world. One of the spots on our mist-see list was an unconventional art installation that challenged our ideas about craft, and the role of the maker in art.
Tucked away on a quite side road near Carnaby street is the Bourdon Street Chippy.
Inside you won’t find the usual salt, vinegar, and sticky floors; instead, everything from the booth seats to the brown sauce is handcrafted from felt. This is the latest work from textile artist and craftivist Lucy Sparrow whose work blurs the lines between performance and installation art, prompting questions about our relationships with consumerism, our surroundings, and the everyday ‘fabric’ of our lives.
Encouraging people to take a closer look.
Elevating the everyday
In 2014, Sparrow used Kickstarter funding to transform an abandoned London store into corner shop where everything- from biscuits to bic lighters, even the till and signage- was made of felt. After this came a bagel store, sweet shop, pharmacy, and an NY convenience store, the felt takeover launching Lucy from solo artist to leading an entire team of stitchers.
I’ve followed Lucy’s journey, via her brilliant, heart warming, often bizarre Instagram page for many years- from early DIY projects with Sebastian the banana, to life-size installations and selling out thousands of felt replicas. I’ve loved to see how she’s evolved from stitching everything by hand into the creative force behind what is now, effectively, an entire felt factory. There is ongoing discussion about whether this mix of irreverence, highly skilled work, and playful palette is art or craft. The artist herself though rejects over analysis of the work, saying- “I made this, and it didn’t need to be made, but I did it anyway”. I agree that this is art. Art at its finest, not for galleries, but for the everyday- both inspiring and entertaining.
[Image Credit: Alun Callender]
The emotional pull of nostalgia
I find there is something so charming, so irreverent, about seeing so many familiar products and items faithfully rendered in felt, many of them smiling back at you with tiny black button eyes and broad smiles.
What makes Lucy’s work irresistible for me isn’t just how funny it is, or the admirably intense level of detail- it’s the soul. I didn’t expect to feel emotional about felt Pukka pies and tiny smiling baked beans, and yet I couldn’t help it. These aren’t just novelties, designed for the sale- in this reflection of British culture are thousands of tiny, hand-stitched odes to the everyday. I was reminded of home comforts, my friend Ben who worked in a chip shop so similar during our university years, and of primary craft projects- cutting and sticking, revelling in colour as the foundation of my creative process (obviously!). Here, presented in fuzzy microcosm is the joy that can be found in the small and familiar things that make up our lives if we look a little more closely.
[Image Credit: Alun Callender]
the studio viewpoint
This ‘slice of life’ reminded us that the immersion and connection we are always striving for in our experience design work can be as analogue, as simple as tuning into the customer mindset and understanding what makes them nostalgic or what makes them laugh. Want to discover more of our insight and the studio’s creative offer?