05.11.08
Making art from barrels, part seven

barley_edit

After months of research, distillery trips, making test sculptures in polyboard, deconstructing real barrels and pursuing a few blind alleys, we’ve finally got an idea that works for our Glenfiddich project.

We’ve been looking for a way to construct designs and art based on whisky barrels that somehow communicates the truly vast amount of time the alcohol spends in a cask (between twelve and thirty years).

We finally had a bit of a breakthrough when we began to think of the elements of the barrel as having clear ‘jobs’ to do, for a clearly defined amount of time. So, for example, one single spring has supplied the water for Glenfiddich for over a hundred years.

spring_source_side

So perhaps we could arrange some barrel slats in this way, and etch, or cut a sentence into the side, such as ‘for 132 years our spring has been our single source’. As a thought we liked this - it follows the ‘time’ theme but lets us use the barrels and the distillery in a much more unusual way.

As another example, we thought that the barrel ‘bungs’ had an interesting role, either to state how long they will act as gatekeeper...

bungs_2

...or imagine what they would say once their barrels were opened.

bungs_1

The 20 year old whisky spends 20 years in American oak casks, then it’s is finished off in rum casks (a sweeter flavour, or something like that) so we wondered if we could show that somehow. Perhaps like this...

us_flag_barrel

cuba_1

...or like this.

us_cuba_barrel

The distillery still grows some of its own barley in the fields opposite. Maybe we could show that somehow, with side-etched slats?

barley_field

(In case it’s tricky to read it says ‘we still grow whisky in the fields by the distillery’).

We’ve also been trying to think of a good way to use the barrel hoops: maybe as typography that we could build or weld, then display at the distillery itself?

hoops_plan

hoops_in_yard

On a similar theme of using the distillery as a backdrop, we wondered what would happen if we stencilled onto the lids of the barrels that wait to be filled up again, to make a sentence, such as ‘we will wait our turn’.

wait_our_turn

So. The good news is, the client really likes the idea. Of the dozen or so ideas we presented on this theme, we’ve decided on 5 to develop further into real ‘barrel art’. The ideas above, although we like them, are the rejects. Harsh, but true. It’s now full steam ahead to build our final five.

This is part of a running series tracking the progress of a live project for Glenfiddich where we've been asked to design some barrel art for the whisky manufacturer, and we’ve agreed to ‘log’ the project’s progress on Thought for the week.

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