His grandfather’s hair is as white as the incised lines of chalk in the background of the image. Warwicker was standing behind his grandfather, looking down the hill. He took a photograph of his grandfather sitting on the Long Man’s head. And so, in my own little eight-year-old head, I connected what I did that morning – making a mark – with what has been.” I felt a real magic – climbing up onto the Long Man – of history, time, place, all collapsed. Now, how old it is, who knows? This is the Long Man. Pretty incredible, simplified aesthetic shape. On one of the hills is a chalk figure that has been incised into the actual hillside by taking away the grass. The village of Wilmington, it’s a classic sort of English village – churchyard with a 600–700-year-old oak tree, a church that was probably built in the 10th century, and these rolling hills. “That afternoon – I remember drawing on the promenade in the morning – Granddad and Dad decided we were going to go to Wilmington, take a little trip. Like any kid, you pick up something, you make a mark. “You could actually walk from Brighton all the way to Saltdean on this pathway, which is about five miles. “I used to draw on the stone promenade with the shards of chalk that had fallen down from the chalk cliffs,” he says. There was always the sound of the sea, the rhythm of it, in the background. His grandparents lived on the south coast of England, near Brighton in East Sussex. “You weren’t supposed to, but it wasn’t in glass.” Warwicker speaks about the “micro-world of graphic design” but this micro-world bleeds into everything, into the world around us.Īs a little kid Warwicker ran his hands over the hieroglyphs on the Egyptian sarcophagi in the British Museum. I know this work, without previously knowing Warwicker’s name or anything about tomato. There’s the title sequence to Trainspotting. I’ve danced late at night to the British electronic band Underworld – band members Karl Hyde and Rick Smith are also founding members of tomato – and watched the music videos. The tomato aesthetic has a rhythmic chaos to it, an appreciation for beauty that embraces the random, and feels like a background to the past few decades. Looking through Amateur, a collection of Warwicker’s work from his first 25 years, everything feels strangely familiar. ![]() He’s best known for his work with multidisciplinary design collective tomato, which he co-founded in 1991. Instead, he has me thinking about play, how to break things, how to use rules, parameters in artmaking – especially photography – and what questions I might ask a tuft of grass. Warwicker brushes off academic language, despite being a professor at the Victorian College of the Arts. His contemporaries include Brian Eno, Jonathan Ive, Peter Saville, Tim Berners-Lee and Margaret Calvert. A member has to die for a space to open up. It’s a lifetime appointment and only 200 designers can hold the title. He’s serious about his work but not in the way I thought he might be, as a Royal Designer for Industry, the highest institutionalised accolade for designers in Britain. He sounds very English despite his near 20 years in Australia. Warwicker is telling jokes, stories, laughing. I make space among it all for my mug of Earl Grey. ![]() On the large wooden tabletop itself are paper versions, experiments cut into yellow and orange paper curlicues. His wife is sculptor Naomi Troski and her curling white wire mesh forms are attached to the wall. Here in the dining room are also objects. There’s a grand piano, top down, piled high with more books. What’s shelved, mostly, is books: art books, design books, catalogues. ![]() The interior walls are predominantly floor-to-ceiling shelving. We are drinking tea at John Warwicker’s house in Melbourne.
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