Since the last time we posted about this project, we’ve been looking harder at the brief, looking harder at what others have done with barrels, and questioning the client a bit about why they came to us.
It turns out that Glenfiddich were really interested in our fascination with time, and the fact that we have a whole section of our website devoted to it.
Also, the fact that we’d done some installation/ wooden/timepiece based work (like this project) was useful. (Phew, knew that clock project would come in handy one day).
The reason why time is such a big thing to them is that Glenfiddich are really trying hard to explain to people just how long their whisky spends in the barrels (up to 30 years), as opposed to dodgier whiskys and bourbons that can barreled for as little as 3 years.
Their recent advertising campaign (below) is picking up on this with an ‘every year counts’ theme. Not mind-blowing, but we can see what they’re getting at.
Meanwhile. our travels on the interweb continue to dig up some great stuff as regards ‘901 things you can do with a barrel’. Staircases and furniture anyone?
Or just generally chopping them up to make interesting shapes and sculptures.
There’s a great tradition of painted barrels in Japan as well, which we’ve only just discovered.
The next task is to work out how to take this ‘time’ theme and apply it onto (or into) the barrels, somehow.
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. The first piece was here, the second piece was here.