Cabin Fever
Canadian designer Cynthia Hathaway talks about designing her Memory Wallpaper.
By Paul Makovsky
February 2004
Cynthia Hathaway was invited by Mother (www.motherbrand.com), a
collaborative firm of Canadian product and graphic designers, to submit
a design proposal for an exhibition on one of Canada's most enduring
icons, the cabin. She came up with Memory Wallpaper, which looks like
fake wood but "comes full of surprises." The wallpaper was
first shown in the traveling exhibition Cabin, which debuted at
Tokyo Designers Block last October. The idea behind the show, which
included products and prototypes such as a cork tablecloth, a T-shirt
logo quilt, and a cedar table, was to not only explore the stereotype of
being Canadian but also reflect on the Canadian spirit. Recently
Hathaway spoke to Metropolis about her wallpaper.
***
The wallpaper is a photographic image of fake wood. I like taking existing
things and transforming them into something else. Why do we have to always
be inventing new things if it's not necessary?
The different motifs include images of things like a cuckoo clock, an oil
lamp, a spoon collection, canoe oars, or a Royal Canadian Mounted Police
ceramic souvenir of a Mountie on a horse--things that are "cabinesque."
A cuckoo clock isn't necessarily Canadian. It's more geared to the cabin
idea. In a way the objects become Canadian when placed in a cabin. It's
difficult to define what being Canadian is. I think it can be a gathering
of these different objects that might come from all over the place that
we bring together and enjoy in one space.
The white cutouts are a blank, an opening. I'm always interested in two
things going on at the same time. It's wasteful to forget our past. There's
no point in wiping the slate clean when we can still use the past. Sometimes
we've got to let the past shine through.
Once I figured out the idea for the wallpaper and an easy way of producing
it, I went to a decal cutter who uses machinery that normally cuts letters
and asked him to put this material through his machinery. They had never
done wallpaper before, but it worked out well. I like to ask people to try
something new.
It's named Memory Wallpaper because it has to do with nostalgia. You can
apply the paper over old wallpaper and let the old paper show through. The
layers of time are exposed through these outlines. At one point I thought
of calling it Cabin Fever, but I decided that name didn't bring up this
element of layers of time enough. Memory Wallpaper has a slower tone, with
the idea that you take your time thinking of these things.
I came up with this idea that the cabin is part of a nostalgic dream about
being Canadian. I wanted to bring the idea of a cabin into your life. I've
never been fortunate enough to have a cabin in my life, and this is a way
to bring it to me and to others who know all about it, and at the same time
make offices, for example, more cozy places. |
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Cynthia Hathaway (b. 1965) was born and raised in Newmarket, Ontario.
She studied at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver,
British Columbia, and graduated in 2000 with a degree in architectural
design from the Akademie voor Beeldende Kunst (AKI) in Enschede, the
Netherlands, and went on to get her masters in product design from the
Design Academy in Eindhoven in 2002. Hathaway currently lives and works
in Eindhoven, where she is a freelance designer and art director of the
masters program FunLab at the Eindhoven Academy. In addition to recently
completing a series of clocks and photographs for Droog, she is working
on another wallpaper project to be released later this year.
Images courtesy Cynthia Hathaway |
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