Emma Calder's Different Art forms

Collage is the medium for Emma Calder's Moody Days Sticker Book. The illustrations are a mixture of small stickers stuck on, or bits of pencil drawing, watercolour, photographs, scanned images, rubber stamp printing etc...

Like this image for the Stuck section of Moody Days, which was made with rubber stamps and drawings on tiny stickers.  

And this one from the title page. (Every sticker is a different face but it didn't take long too do, just mad sticker frenzy!)

When I was searching through old portfollios for this blog, I came across this drawing I did at five or six years old and I thought it was strickingly similar to the Spots above. Even though I hadn't seen it for over thirty years.

Over my career I have used many different artforms for my animation, instillations and graphic work, from motorised sculptures to jewellery design but, my favourite has always been collage. 

 Grandma's knitted tie and hangman earrings 1978

So for this week and the next few weeks blog, I am going to show you some of my old collage illustrations from the days before Photoshop was invented. These designs show partly the evolution of the sticker style in Moody Days.

One example of my student montage work is this poster for the Royal College of Art M.A Degree show in 1983. 

 

Each character included in the poster was a collage of different students work, from different departments in the college. 

 

I was quite naughty because, before checking with anyone, I found the technician who was printing up photographs of student work for the degree show catalogue, asked him for all the reject prints and also got others out of the bin. 
 

Back in the graphics studio, I cut them up, drew into them, photocopied and then coloured them. 

 Emma Calder in the Graphics Studio at the R.C.A 1983.

 

After I had done the artwork, I tracked down students whose work I had used and got their permission. I accidentally forgot to tell one person and when he saw the printed poster he got very annoyed. I had used a piece of his product design, for the head of one of my characters. He did forgive me luckily. Trouble is, if I had asked everyone in advance, people might  have said no, or grumbled if their work was not included. You have to take chances in life sometimes.

 Emma Calder with Paul Javis and Stuart Jane in the Graphics Studio at the R.C.A 1983

Love Stickers

After I had made the first two of my small sticker sheets, into The Long Thin Sticker Books and was selling them in various shops, I started to think about my audience more, what they would like, rather than anything that just popped into my head. 

 

I decided in January 2006 that I would do some love stickers for Valentines day, but not the usual soppy stuff, more of a mixture of feelings. Unrequited love and desperate desire. The result was some quite attractive if slightly unnerving stickers. 

These sticker's did end up in Emma Calder's Moody Day's and became the centre piece of the Love Day section. These stickers differ from the first two sets, as they were not designed to be stuck up in the street, but, were conceived as embellishments, for letters between lovers, for people to stick in their diaries, or on the back of their mobile phones. They were also designed to work in the long thin book format and have a more narrative feel.

The artwork for the Love stickers was mainly created with a rubber stamp heart, that I stole from my son, then scanned into Photoshop, where I drew into the printed and collaged artwork. The various bits of text were sourced from miserable note book entries, from my personal collection of letters and poems never posted. I just took lines out of the poems and put them with the pictures. I also was reading a library book on hip hop at the time and I wrote down the odd word/phase that seemed apt from that. Like “broken windows”, although I can't remember what the book was called now.

For the love section in Moody Days I did actually include one short poem, it is incorporated into the main illustration for the chapter so you can read that when you get to see the book.

The letter never sent, that some of the love stickers were based on was written in 1993. I didn't include it in the book but, I do here. It's now seventeen years later again, talk about being STUCK:

Greedy hungry dying

Hot Hot Hot

Tanned Golden alone

Do you remember how we kissed?

Have you forgotten?

Do you remember the summer of '76

That hot hot summer almost 17 years ago.

Do you remember me?

Just 17.

Tanned, golden, alone.

Do you remember that night?

Do you remember how

I stole thought the fence

Uninvited?

Do you remember you?

On the grass cross legged.

Playing your guitar?

Do you remember how I came and sat with you?

How we disappeared into your parents garden.

How we kissed

Do you?

Memory is very selective and funny sometimes. When I wrote Hot Hot Hot, I could clearly remember the steel band at the party, playing a song by the same name. But according to Wikipedia, it wasn't recorded until 1982, although the man that wrote it Alphonsus Celestine Edmund Cassell (Arrow) could, have written it, before it was officially recorded.  Or maybe, it was his band playing that night at this trendy Notting Hill communal garden party. Who knows, it might be my mind playing tricks, it was a hot night and a great steel band.

By turning the internal fantasy into something that others can share in the form of stickers, is turning the dream of passion, into a tiny aesthetic sticker experience.

That is what lies at the heart of Emma Calder's Moody days. Making fun, attractive work, from quite tricky feelings and ideas.