CULTURE Soh’s work is
CULTURE Soh’s work is fascinating and slightly disturbing: think a short film by David Lynch with Alexander McQueen as creative director DIGITAL NATIVE: SHAWN SOH Shawn Soh is a “one to watch”. He hasn’t got a huge body of work behind him nor a client list as long as your arm, but he’s got raw talent in abundance that suggests he’ll go far. This prediction is based almost entirely on his graduate degree show at London’s Central Saint Martins art college in 2015 (where he collaborated with filmmaker Nathanael Brooks). Digital Afterlife is a video piece that saw Soh creating a series of stark black and white human vignettes, where the individuals take on a mutated appearance via the application of morphing materials. The effect is at once fascinating and slightly disturbing – think a short film directed by an Eraserhead-era David Lynch with Alexander McQueen as creative director. Above: Shawn Soh. Main image, above and right: images from Soh’s Digital Afterlife video 48 j THE DESIGN ISSUE
Kristjana Williams in her studio and examples of her complex cut and paste work WHERE GRAPHIC DESIGN MEETS ART: KRISTJANA S WILLIAMS The intricacy of Kristjana S Williams’s work is matched only by its beauty. Mining a rich vein of brightly coloured Victoriana, Williams has created a body of work ranging from maps to fine art prints and interior products. Her modus operandi is cut and paste, creating detailed collage worlds inhabited by animals that hark back to a Phileas Fogg-feeling past. English-born, Williams moved to Iceland at the tender age of two. She later returned to England working as a surveyor, before finding her graphic calling and going on to study at London’s auspicious Central Saint Martins art school. She set up her own business in 2012 and has been garnering attention and awards ever since. It’s a measure of the popularity of her work that her style is now being picked up and emulated by mainstream companies. She says that her chromatic exuberance is a reaction against the greyscale nature of Iceland and her work has been poetically described as the “visual equivalent of eating a box of rich, inventive and, crucially, hand-crafted chocolates”. Recently she created a 5m by 2.8m collage for the 32nd floor of London’s Shard skyscraper and a piece for Mayfair’s Connaught Hotel then used as the basis for 160 branded pieces, from ‘Do not disturb’ signs to menus and umbrellas. THE DESIGN ISSUE j 49
