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Interview by Alex Crowfoot
Designer Bim Ricketson wears so many hats he could start a shop - film director, animator, exhibition designer, packaging and graphic designer and – since being commissioned to create this issue’s cover – Cyclic Defrost Art Director. Currently embedded in Qatar working on the Asian Games, he files this long-distance report from the world of sparkly ‘I Heart Saudi’ stickers and artificial reefs made from toilets.
Bim’s subject matter for the cover, commissioned before he became Cyclic’s Art Director, is one that seems particularly topical for an Australian magazine – water.
“On the front is a series of photographs of the backs of water trucks and the type is a handwritten Arabic translation of the English,” explains Ricketson. “The back is a collection of photos showing my ‘graffiti’ around Qatar, of the magazine cover text, written in water on dusty objects. I am living and working in Qatar at the moment, where it’s extremely hot and dusty, water is a major concern and there is an abundance of fuel guzzling vehicles. I wanted to incorporate all of this into a concept related to the title of the mag, and stay away from the design tools I usually work in. These water trucks are the main source of drinking water for the country and you can’t go anywhere without seeing them.”
“I’m also a graffiti tragic, and I don’t have the balls to do it myself, especially here, but the back cover shows a non-permanent version, so I get the thrill and the photo without the risk,” he continues. “My intention was to spell out all the type of the cover on dusty windshields of abandoned vehicles (there are lots), but after a few weeks I ran out of time and couldn’t complete the set. I also got a bit freaked on a lone highway where I was ‘tagging’ cars and a car full of locals stopped and cursed me. I don’t know what the punishment is for graffiti in this country, and I’m glad I didn’t find out.”
“Getting all the shots has probably been the highlight of my time here – I head out with my backpack, water and a paintbrush and wander around the streets taking photos and looking for abandoned vehicles, coming across all sorts of interesting stuff I would not have otherwise seen. To me the cover is a true reflection of design and culture here – it’s design done by non-designers, with a loose set of rules, and whatever comes out is acceptable. This is not one of the countries in the region which holds onto its past with great vigour, and is in a state of rapid development. Some of it is just a bit ‘wobbly’.”
The concept has taken several left turns during its development, however.
“The idea for the cover has been a long time germinating and taken all sorts of directions. I’m really into randomness in design, in the Dada style of ‘cut a bunch of words out of the newspaper, put them different pockets of your clothes, then pull them out at random and you’ve got a poem’ type thing. I like accidents and being able to see the working behind the art. A lot of what I work on in design has to be very precise and accurate, so breaking out of this is a great relief and something I seek more and more now. I’m also very interested in film, so I wanted to make a cover that involved film in some way. I was hoping that I could have the cover as stills from a film that you could then jump on to the Cyclic site and watch in its entirety.”
“The other major angle I had wanted to incorporate, and this is fairly obvious given the title of this dear mag, is ice. My girlfriend has drawn a lot of inspiration from Andy Goldsworthy in her set design lately and I’ve become fascinated by his work. He’s an English environmental artist who makes sculptures/installations in nature from leaves, stones, twigs or ice etc. He often has photographs of the degeneration of his work, showing nature ‘reclaiming’ his creations. From these three ideas my concept was to go down to my Dad’s farm, create the letters that make up the title of the magazine and film their melting. I would do something interesting with time lapse and use stills from the film for the cover.”
“ I moved to Qatar for work before I could execute this, and it’s developed further. In a practical sense, not having a video camera with me means it will be a series of photos rather than a film. And with the limited resources I have at my disposal I’m finding it quite difficult to create the ice ‘letters’ that I want. Conceptually it has also started to become loaded with new meaning; as I mentioned, water is something at the front of your mind all the time in a place like this. It’s one of the hottest, driest countries in the world, you can easily suffer heat exhaustion after just a short time outside without water and everything is covered in a fine layer of dust. And on the one or two occasions that it does rain in a year, the city every roof leaks (no gutters) and every road floods (no drainage). It’s madness, the country is built for sun, not rain, and certainly not ice.”
“The ice idea became water when I found I couldn’t get the ice out the door for more than a minute before it melted. And the canvas became anything interesting that was covered in dust, which is anything that’s been outside for a few hours.”
So there you have it – a series of photographs of water trucks and the letters of the magazine written in dust all the way from Doha, Qatar.
Ricketson’s work across several disciplines had its genesis in his early training.
“I graduated from industrial design in 1999. I started the course as a sneaky way to move across to graphic design. But I loved industrial design and stayed on. You get a pretty good grounding in all sorts of design areas, so I’m glad I did stick with it. I moved to Perth just after graduating; having a wider range of skills was helpful in a small city. My first design job there was as a junior interior designer, and most of my other work was as a graphic designer. In Sydney I worked as a toy and packaging designer, then as an exhibition designer for two years until I went freelance last year.”
“Freelance is great because you have the freedom to take up the interesting opportunities that arise, like animation, this gig in Qatar, or using the downtime for personal projects. I’ve also taken over the directing mantle of the Reelife Short Film Festival for young Australian film makers with something to say about the issues that affect them. Promoting our local young talent is a huge thrill. Especially when our grand prize winner this year was a 15 year-old from Canberra!
The variety in Ricketson’s work comes from being open to opportunity, he says, but this can also have its down side. “It’s a blessing and a curse – being able to turn your hand at lots of different things means you’re available for lots of work. Not being dedicated to one area probably means clients can’t pin you down in their mind as being the guy to go to for a particular task. I find working on 3D spaces more interesting than straight graphic design because you’ve got the added element of space. You might also be able consider lighting, sound and movement. Write and direct a film and you get all of those things, plus actors, a story, editing and most importantly, a strong emotional response. So film is where it’s at for me. It’s like design cubed. And I’m just a beginner, so I look forward to everything there is to learn about film making.”
“Much of my family are involved in film, but I didn’t want to head in that direction, probably just to buck the trend. A few years ago it dawned on a friend and I that we had everything around us to make a film and that we’d be mad not to. I wrote a little script and directed, she produced, and between our friends we got actors, editors, musicians, technicians and got it done. That film, First Date, played at a few festivals. It won some cash, which set us up for our next one – another short, shot on film, with a lot more ‘design’ and post production. It got into more festivals, including Montreal and Finland. The AFC funded me to attend the festival in Finland. It was pretty funny to fly all that way to see a four-minute film screened twice!”
“The transition to film presents a different perspective and a new set of challenges, although some design skills have turned out to be useful,” Ricketson explains.
“I tend to look at film as a breakdown of moments or tableaus, like a sketch or a render, which may or may not be a good thing. My design experience with building crews and working with clients helps with the running of the film production and getting the look I want. Working with actors is the area that is least like design and the hardest for a person used to working in visuals – you can’t design a performance, you actually have to communicate with a real person, and make them trust you enough to open up and bring their experience out for the camera. Tough, but exciting.”
For the moment however, film work is on hold. “When the opportunity came up to move to Qatar I jumped at the chance. It’s a part of the world you never expect to end up living in. But not just that, the project is fascinating from a design perspective. And with the scale of the project (read budget!) and the willingness of the minds behind it to push the envelope, there are all sorts of mind-boggling things being attempted that have never been done before. It’s all very exciting. For the months I was working on this in Sydney, I was Closing Ceremony Associate Designer. I was working with an amazing theatre and opera designer, Gabriela Tylesovaturning her sketches into the first semblance of working drawings – how these elements might actually be built, lit, flown, set on fire, transported, painted, upholstered, danced on, projected on etc. Here in Doha I am one of four CAD designers, so I am mostly doing workshop drawings of the props and scenery elements, often the same things I sketched out months ago in Sydney.”
“I have just had my contract extended right up to the end of the Games, at which point I will have been living here for five and half months. Other than the work, I stayed because I enjoy living here – I find the country baffling, beautiful, exotic, mad.”
Part of its baffling nature comes from an off-kilter population demographic, says Ricketson. “Actual Qataris are a small minority, the majority being guest workers, mostly South Asian men. Wikipedia tells me ‘Because the expatriates are overwhelmingly male, Qatar has the most heavily skewed sex ratio in the world, with 1.88 males per female’! Apart from Westerners, you meet Iranians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Sudanese and so on from this region. Other than workmates, I mostly meet guest workers in the service industry – Filipino bus drivers, Nepalese doormen, Indian cab drivers, Bangladeshi chefs. I can think of only one Qatari that I have met – in the supermarket. The other problem is the climate. Everyone is inside. It’s so hot that you never walk anywhere. Running into someone on the street is unlikely. My position at work is not one that involves any interaction with locals. In fact, I think very few Qataris need to work at all. From my understanding, they pay no taxes, nor water or power bills, get free education and healthcare for life, and a generous yearly allowance from the Emir, as well as ownership of businesses run by guest workers. And yes, there is some irony in the Ceremonies showcasing Qatari culture and industry to the world when they are run almost entirely by ex-patriots.”
“Like everything else in Qatar, the beach culture presents a striking contrast to an east coast Australian. A lovely little town just south of the city called Al Wakra has a nice sand beach and lagoon. It’s a working fishing town, with ancient little mud mosques and a nice park just back from the beach. The Friday afternoon when I was there, the scene was somewhat different from home – a game of soccer being played by Asian men on their one afternoon off; five or six boys kneeling on the sand praying; a quad bike doing donuts; a couple of families paddling in the water, with the mothers sweating in their black head-to-toe abayas at the shore. There’s also a seaside ‘resort’ called Sea Line, which is a popular weekend destination, with camel rides on the beach and an abundance of leopard print g-strings. There’s also an artificial diving reef but, hilariously, it’s made up of thousands of ceramic toilets, car, bike and boat chassis’s, and so forth.
Local culture is surprising low-key, says Ricketson. “There’s not much street life (due to the heat), there’s little in the way of theatre and the arts, and very few museums. But it’s all changing, they’re building plenty of stuff now, like a large Islamic art and craft museum, designed by I. M. Pei, an impressive new library of Islamic literature and so on. One sort of ‘clash’ is the difference between the behaviour of the locals ‘indoors’ and in public. Most local women dress in head to toe black abaya when outdoors, but at home, or away from the public eye, they wear whatever they want. A stage manager friend here described a rehearsal with about 100 local women where they all removed their abayas to reveal mid riff tops, bejeweled high heels and mini skirts!”
Ultimately, however, the lack of much visible tradition creates a fascinating alternative cultural space. “Visually this place is more exciting than anywhere else I‘ve been; things are often approached from a direction I am completely unfamiliar with,” says Ricketson. “The most invigorating ‘design experience’ I have had in years is just walking around the suburb that I live in. The buildings are brutally free of ornaments, a mix of ‘modern’, Arabic and Western, often painted stark white or crazy colours, and almost unreal in the bright sunlight. Islamic pattern details on fences, walls and gates. Persian feral cats sleeping on top of shiny Hummers. TV aerials fashioned into Eiffel Towers. And I’ve started a collection of funny translations. Personal favourites include: ‘computer and rolex juices’; ‘crashed garlic’; ‘homos with meet’; ‘viagra sandwiches’; and the explosive ‘pomegrenade’ juice! The Make Me A Virgin Again ointments and soaps are everyone’s favourite send home souvenir.”
“There are a lot of roundabouts in Doha and they are used as stages for some very interesting public art. There’s Giant Clam Roundabout, Rubble Roundabout, Picnic Roundabout, Bird Flu Roundabout, Slope Roundabout (yes, this is what it’s actually labeled as on the map). The TV is a good source of entertainment, but not in the usual sense. Most mail is ‘censored’ for profane material, yet there are about 30 phone sex TV stations, beamed in from Europe. A country that won’t allow in Jews and confiscates Bibles at the border has a dozen US evangelical Christian stations, including my favourite JesusVeg TV, the vegetarian Christian channel. Love scenes are censored in films, often with hilarious results – they don’t just cut the scene out, they’ll fill the space with random footage from elsewhere in the film. Watching the English version of the Saudi news gives a unique perspective on the world. Many film clips of men with falcons.”
With less than a million people, and most of them expats, a thriving music culture is also hard to find, says Ricketson. “The normal places you might see new bands and music are licensed premises like pubs and bars. I have had one fantastic musical experience. A favourite pastime of the Qatari is to go dune bashing in the desert nearby. A bunch of us from work went with a tour company in hotted up 4WDs with enormous sand tires. Our young Palestinian driver had a serious sound system in his vehicle and drove like a maniac. He played his own mix of contemporary Arabic and mainstream US hiphop/RnB, which I normally wouldn’t get into, but when played side by side with good Arabic tunes it rocked. Being scared shitless racing down five storey high sand dunes with excellent Arabic pop giving you ear bleeds was a total sensory experience that will stick with me for a long time. There was a ‘rave’ a few weeks ago too, at one of the big swish hotels. Some awful DJs claiming to be ‘direct from the UK’ entertained the crowd with fresh tunes from Black Box and Technotronic.”
Being immersed in another culture has brought some personal surprises, however.
“I’ve turned into someone who enjoys shopping, which I normally loathe! Any little shop is stacked with dirt cheap gems that I can’t stop buying. Who wouldn’t want a sparkly I Heart Saudi sticker? Or a collection of postcards depicting Bollywood stars from the 1980s? An Arabic Scrabble set and Abaya Barbie? I have even got a growing collection of Arabic utility stickers – No Smoking, Arabic Speaking, Beware of the Dog, just because they look so damn cool. I don’t know how I’m going to get it all home…” |
