Seeing Which Way the Wind Blows.
Seeing Which Way the Wind Blows
With Ella Sutherland
Split/Fountain, Auckland
Launched 9 February 2013
Seeing Which Way the Wind Blows treated graphic design as a method of research rather than a service, undertaken deliberately outside the client-designer relationship. Over the course of a week, using S/F as both studio and point of entry, the project set out to build a subjective portrait of the city through the visual languages already present within it—reading a place through what it puts on display, and using what was found there to prompt new work.
Four lines of inquiry served as ways into a place largely unfamiliar to us: S/F itself, as a home base; Leisure, which led to the yacht clubs and boating culture of the harbour; Time, which took us to the Saturday-morning Ōtara Market in South Auckland; and Volcano, which had us seeking out those who could speak to the implications of a city built across an active volcanic field.
Phase 1: Public Talk & Propositions
The work proceeded in three phases. It opened, on 9 February 2013, with a public talk setting out our approach through an overhead projector, A4 handouts, a vinyl diagram, and a ‘draft’ flag—the draft status deliberate, signalling both a lack of fixed direction and an intention to arrive and see what was there; as the press release noted, a flag may serve as a symbol, a signalling device, or a decoration, but it may equally perform the simple task of seeing which way the wind blows.
Phase 2: Presentation of Research
A week later, the raw material gathered over that week—cheap photographic prints, video, locally sourced flowers, bespoke airbrushed hats—was returned to the space as an evolving presentation, an exercise in deciding quickly what to show and how to show it.
Phase 3: Final Work
A month on, the project closed with S/F > Leisure > Time > Volcano, a publication collecting the writing produced around each inquiry, presented alongside new flags fixed to the exterior of the space to mark its half-hidden position, a further flag raised on an existing pole a few blocks away, and posters cataloguing our favourite boat names from Bayswater Marina.
