Much of how I think today was honed by my time at the Royal College of Art. I focused my time there understanding the subtle craft of editing. Through editing, I learned how to manipulate meaning, reveal underlying patterns and focus the attention of the viewer. Through editing, I learned to adopt a process that had the sole intent of revealing a single powerful idea.
My first experiment, three editions of The Guardian Newspaper. highlighting unassociated images and text in a grid by removing all else. This simple game revealed new relationships, spatially in the grid and contextually in meaning.
Simon Esterson the Executive Creative Director of The Guardian Newspaper saw the work at the end of year show and said, 'you've worked out how to take the newspaper apart, now do you want to learn how to put it back together?'
The second experiment was a series of cards called ‘vacant’ investigating how physical stores visually express closing down. With this, I tried (in vein) to edit out all information other than the typography displayed on the hoardings.
The third experiment took the film script for ‘À bout de shuffle’, the seminal John Luc Goddard Film that first employed jump cuts. The final piece took eight editions of the Herald Tribune (the paper sold by the heroine) and edited breath of the script, jump cutting the narrative visually and typographically.