Last week we posted about a new project that we’ve just started, where we’ve been asked to create some ‘Barrel Art’ for Glenfiddich Whisky.
Since our visit to the distillery we’ve been doing quite a bit of research into what has been done before – the most notable being the project they ran last year where they asked various creative types to take a barrel each and do something about the year that barrel dated from.
So David Pearson (he of Penguin books fame) based his design on 1989, the year that particular year of 18-year-old whisky was barrelled up (if that’s a word). He took Schiller's ‘Ode to Joy’, the Berlin Wall, 1989, Subbuteo players and enamelled type (ok it’s kind of complicated, you can read up on it here) and came up with the barrel at the top of this post.
Glaswegian designers Timorous Beasties based their barrel on 1992…
…and tailor Nick Hart based his on 1977.
The most interesting, structurally, was record sleeve designer Storm Thorgerson’s, which is based on a lotus flower of barrel parts and is a kind of metaphor for the maturing of the whisky.
Since then Glenfiddich in Russia gave another eight to Russian artists, here are some of the results.
We think that some of these are quite nice – the only problem for us is that the barrels end up looking very solid and heavy. We’re hoping to find a way to use them in a more interesting way than just applying pictures or paint to them, we think.