Having recently celebrated their 10th Birthday, Northover&Brown have been reflecting on a creative collaboration that grew from a shared love of design and storytelling. From designing visitor experiences at the Tower of London to wrapping a building on Whitehall, directors Mel Northover and Alison Brown have had little time to develop their personal art collaborations since they founded the design studio until recently. “Our poster work really came from a desire to strip things back”, says Mel who acknowledges the shift in focus during the pandemic. “I think we must have been seeking solace in simplicity by trying to reduce all the noise and clutter and get back to the bare essentials and what we really enjoy.” Their work explores elemental geometric forms, and regularly plays with visual illusion. Alison continues “It’s often much more challenging to balance fewer elements and you find yourself really interrogating the subtleties that can create tension within compositions.”
Used to working with large format imagery, Northover&Brown’s latest artworks were designed to be printed up to 3m in height, retaining their detail and quality. “We love working at scale, you can really begin to feel immersed in these printed worlds where the boundary between real and imagined spaces begins to blur.” Their work has continued to develop with a series exploring colour and its effect on mood, light and space and a series inspired by woodlands.
Mel is a keen naturalist and wanted to make a series of drawn works around the idea that everything is connected. She describes; “I’m extremely interested in woodland ecology and the relationship between species in our wild spaces. The Arboreal print series grew from my love of broadleaf woodlands and my fascination with mycorrhizal fungal networks! The more you learn about them, particularly their role in the communication between trees, the more you can’t fail to be inspired”.
The print series combines photography and drawing to convey the environmental connections that although often hidden under the surface, underpin the natural world sustaining us all.
The studio is hoping to expand later this year to set up a printing space; “We’d really like to explore the potential of screen printing using pure pigments and produce some unique pieces that combine different disciplines”.
Northover&Brown are a London based multi-disciplinary design studio that produce graphic design, animation, illustration and photography to tell diverse stories in print and in exhibition spaces in the collections of museums and cultural institutions across the UK.
For more information please see www.northoverbrown.com or visit their shop.
@northoverandbrown
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