The Middle Kingdom

In 2018, I entered the final year of my Master of Fine Arts in Visual Communications at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). During this period, I was still trying to define what a self-directed design practice could be. I come from a fine print etching background and any design work I have done in my life has been design solutions for clients. Self-directed design seemed to be a practice that resided somewhere between these two spaces.

Exactly 20 years previously, I had completed my end-of-school examinations in Ireland. I received my six exam results on a small piece of printed paper. Despite the huge amount of pressure put on students regarding these exams, this small piece of paper never did me any good; over the past 20 years, it has only brought negativity. I felt I had left school knowing more about football (the local obsession) than the six subjects I had studied (English, Irish, art, history, maths, and music). For my SAIC Graduate Show project, I decided to redesign my small exam results page, transforming it from something with negative associations into a series of artists’ books that would have a positive function in my life. Each book would explore one of the six subjects and be based on a real game of football from history. Each book would examine the original school subject through the lens of the real game from history, but in a manner that would be beneficial to my creative practice. They would have the dimensions of the football match day programmes I had grown up reading. They would use the same page grid system, the same exam-like paper stock, the same book cover styling, and the same type of faces but would be completely different books in their visual languages.