Laboratory

After the success of our make-it-yourself catalogue for last year’s Jerwood show ‘an experiment in collaboration’ (featured in the Creative Review annual, Design Week Awards runner up and winner of a Platinum award at Graphis) we were asked to make a catalogue for Jerwood’s latest show: Laboratory.

The Laboratory is an experiment: three artists take over the gallery and, starting from nothing, build a show as they go – a totally unpredictable process, with no way of knowing what the work will be like from one day to the next. Everything they do exposed to scrutiny and comment, from the resident writer and photographer to the public and press.

With an experimental show that is one big work in progress we set out to make a catalogue in the true spirit of the show: unpredictable, exposed and experimental. We decided not to design a catalogue. Instead we designed a process,  a way of creating a catalogue that we couldn’t predict and couldn’t control, a way of gathering and documenting everything that happens in the show in real time, built, like the show, in the gallery itself, and only finished as the show closes. We’ve just let it unfold…

Blog
The process started with the Laboratory blog. The artists, curator, writer, resident photographer and designers posted real-time updates on the show to the blog which also automatically draws in related content from external sites like twitter and flickr. Each post has a print option which we use to output content in real time for the printed catalogue. Every post prints the size it appears in the blog, so no two pages are alike.

Catalogue
Each day’s posts are added to the catalogues which are on display in the gallery so you can see the them growing as the  show grows. Posts are joined vertically to make one continuous chronological document. The catalogue kept growing right up until the moment the laboratory closed its doors.