Balding is taboo. Two thirds of men will have experienced it by the time they’re 35. Yet often, it’s accompanied with complicated feelings of shame. Men try to restore, hide or simply refuse to accept this inevitable and natural process of aging.
With Baldpieces, we’re envisaging an alternate reality. One where men embrace the patterns balding creates with magnificent headpieces.
We collaborated with 8 renowned designers from around the globe. Each used different materials and processes to bring the concepts to life.
Rankin, known for his portraits of the Queen, David Bowie and Heidi Klum - among others - then shot the project for us.
Featured as an editorial in issue #21 of Hunger Magazine, we were also interviewed by The Guardian, took out art Image of the Week and racked up 40k likes on Instagram here.
Baldpieces: crowns to adorn balding crowns.
Thank you to the designers:
@bypaulamendoza
@carinashoshtary
@getman_marina
@thegregorykara
@marijapuipaite
@stephaniechloebila
@lauraestradajewelry
@nika_danielska_design
Who run the world? Collaborative filtering recommender algorithms. Also known as ‘Customers who bought this item also bought…’ suggestions. They’ve become ubiquitous in the online world, determining what we look at, buy and like.
Perhaps you’re worried as your life moves online and Alexa moves into your living room, your decisions are essentially being made for you. Perhaps you’re worried you live in a bubble. Perhaps you’ve never thought about it.
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We installed these giant signs in locations around New Zealand. We were interviewed by the BBC while the likes of Arianna Huffington, FastCompany, Lonely Planet, Smithsonian and GQ wrote about the project. The photographs were exhibited at the 2018 Maison & Object in Paris and published in the annual.
The work has been shared widely on Instagram, with over 100,000 likes from love.watts, popmyeyes and plastik alone.
Cornwall Park, a sprawling 425 acre park in the middle of Auckland, commissioned us to create five sculptures. The final three images here show how we directed people in the park to other points of interest... within the park.
When we want to see something - anything - we turn to Google Images.
How do they cope with the avalanche of searches? With an efficient technique called ‘lazy loading’. Scroll quickly to see it in action. Blocks of colours, placeholders, represent the dominant colour of each image. Images load when you want to see them, never before.
Interrupting this process allows us to uncover the essence of anything. Seeing a subject stripped back to its automatically assigned colour palette reveals much about our society. Why does God have muted tones while the The Future is predominantly blue?
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We exhibited and sold all five at 'Vicious Circle' held at the Old Biscuit Factory, London.
In 2021, we were invited to whack up a billboard in Shoreditch. The creative heart of London. It was quickly defaced.
We had the Stone, Bronze and Iron Age. Now, thanks to the internet, we're living in The Information Age. Where previously it was difficult to access knowledge, it’s now essentially instant. But with so much noise, seeing through agendas and knowing what's true has never been harder. It's more like The Overwhelming Age.
This series seeks to acknowledge this unique period of history.
On the 14th of April, 2021, we selected five newspapers from the United Kingdom. The front pages were each turned into single screens and consecutively screen-printed on top of each other by hand. Bright colours were chosen to represent the optimism and hope at the dawn of The Information Age, while the overlaid, layering effect from the colour gives a feeling of depth, complexity and stunning chaos - the real hallmarks of our era.
To mark the release of the screen prints, an open air exhibition was held in June 2021 across billboards in Shoreditch, London.
Many springs ago, we noticed something peculiar. The magnolia petals scattered on the footpath were showing up distinctive marks.
Shoeprints.
The weight of people walking atop the freshly fallen petals - and the shoes on their feet - caused a reaction best described as bruising. During the London spring of 2017, we gathered a collection of the most iconic shoes we could find. Then we stood on a bunch of petals. Here they are in all their beautiful, bruised glory.
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As seen on Designboom and Business Insider.
An edition of 100 was available from The Archivist's Gallery (London) and Subversion Gallery (Glasgow).
Our lives change in an instant. When they do, yesterday’s problems become trivial. We looked at the front page of newspapers the day before and the day after a major news event to explore the news before the news. The news before the storm.
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This microsite is the best way to view the work. As seen on Cool Hunting, Designboom and PostAP Mag.
‘Belly Princess’ is on sale at Salon 21 (NYC). We’ve also created another physical, lenticular piece and included the rest of our experiments here.
2017 was the hottest non-El Niño year on record.
Droughts are leading to wildfires. Melting polar ice is raising the sea level. Warmer seas are causing angrier hurricanes.
Our best defence against global warming is the Paris Agreement – and fortunately every country in the world signed up.
Unfortunately, one man then vowed to withdraw the United States. Trump burying his head in the sand won’t help. Ironically, burying his head in the freezer will.
Trump Trays are recyclable ice-cube trays that make ice-heads of the 45th President's head. All profit goes to environmental charities.
...you could say they’re perfect for global warming.
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The first 5,000 trays was going to cost £100,000, factoring in setup costs and £20k for charity. Crowdfunding was the logical choice.
To build hype, we created limited edition, handmade moulds with Mackinnon and Saunders. We shot the heads and themed cocktails with Myles New.
If you’d been living in Portugal, Ireland, France, Japan, Romania, Germany, Colombia, China, Hungary, Spain, Slovakia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Italy or the United States of America you might have seen them.
The Crowdfunder was ultimately unsuccessful, but we sold out of the handmade moulds and donated £696 to the EJF.
Which could have been where the story ended. Except we’ve licensed the Trump Trays IP. That means they’re available on Amazon and proceeds continue to go to environmental charities.
In Q1 of 2020, the world turned on its head. Doom and gloom was everywhere, and it often came in the form of an exponential graph. A shape that became iconic for all the wrong reasons.
We wanted to reframe this haunting visual into something more positive. And try and find the silver-ish linings within the crisis, using the colours of the rainbow.
We pitched the idea to JCDecaux and Ocean Outdoor, knowing many of their billboard sites were vacant. The initiative launched with an Old St Roundabout takeover, followed by other sites across London, Birmingham and Newcastle over a series of weeks.
Plastic lives on a timescale completely at odds with our human life. A single use plastic fork will last 1,000 years. The only comparable man-made objects are artefacts that have survived from antiquity. The Colosseum. The Pantheon. Trajan's Column. And while the monuments still stand, the society that built them is gone.
We want people to understand the absurdity of this. We want them to think twice about their plastic consumption. So we wanted to create a monumental plastic sculpture. One that pays homage to ancient antiquities - yet is constructed entirely from brightly coloured plastic. Sitting atop would be an absurd plastic duck called Ozyquackius.
Who, just like your plastic fork, would outlive all of us.
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We submitted a proposal to represent New Zealand at the 59th La Biennale di Venezia.
To do so we had to secure multiple production partners and provide a full budget breakdown.
Our application was unsuccessful.
We remain on the lookout for other grants and eccentric billionaires.
A commentary on consumerism? An ironic observation on an industry built on mass producing cheap junk? Could it be an insightful POV on the trading relationship between China and the UK, pre-Brexit? Or is it just… a funny idea.
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We designed, manufactured and sold the range into a store. Mugs, key-rings, coasters and magnets are just the start. It’s easy to imagine an empire: bumper stickers, shot glasses, condoms, neck pillows and more.
Perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Sales to date have been slow, if not stagnant.
Which means the collection is probably still on sale at The London Heritage, 23 Museum St, Holborn. WC1A 1JT.
The Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) invited us to create three bespoke ‘Signs of the Times’ signs for their Biennale, ‘Good Life’.
We were fortunate enough to be present for the installation, take part in a panel discussion and eat dinner at the New Zealand embassy there in Seoul.
When an elderly New Zealand couple nearly died after locking themselves in the car, it was global news. The drama unfolded around 7pm on November the 5th. After entering the car parked in their garage, they accidentally locked the doors from the inside. The car was brand new and the pair believed only the transponder key fob (in the lounge) could unlock the doors. Trying to smash a window with the carjack didn’t work and no one heard their honking - it was Guy Fawkes after all.
The pair weren’t freed until neighbours heard something the following morning. At which point Mollieanne was unconscious and Brian was struggling to breathe.
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We thought telling a story about an adorable elderly couple getting bamboozled by modern technology would make for a brilliant short film.
We wrote a script, got a director and production company onboard and submitted a funding proposal to the NZ Film Commission. We were unsuccessful.
It’s easy to visit a foreign city. There you’ll be greeted by McDonald’s. Starbucks and cliché souvenir shops. These things don’t make a city special. It’s the things you find in a gutter, down an alleyway or happen across that make a city unique.
‘Mystery Lucky City Box’ curates these curiosities and provides the cultural relevance. It pulls the shiny exterior of a city off and offers a raw, authentic look at what’s underneath. MLCB puts the feel, taste and smell of a city you’re not familiar with in your hands.
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Over a pint, Iain Tait mentioned a box of foreign objects his friend sent him. We took the idea and ran with it. A limited number of the London box we created went on sale - and sold out - at tokyobike.
To access a digital version of the 35 page booklet, please drop me a line.
