Curious Fluorious • Artworking a larger-than-life installation

“My challenge was to translate Baker & Borowski’s creative vision for an Alice in Wonderland art installation into full-size fluorescent printable graphics”

— Quote Source

Brief

Having designed an Alice in Wonderland art installation for Crossrail Roof Gardens in Canary Wharf, artists Lee Baker & Catherine Borowski approached me to turn their luminous creative vision into full-size scalable, printable, fluorescent vector images which would become giant vinyl wall stickers, shop window displays, furniture coverings as well as a series of oversize fantastical pieces to adorn the walkways and gardens.

The project

This was definitely a refresher course in deep-dive Adobe Illustrator! Probably the steepest learning curve was rendering an 8ft tall swirling checkerboard wall and floor vinyl that, when joined up and viewed from a certain point, would create a seamless optical illusion of falling down a psychedelic rabbit hole. All of the graphics needed to be precisely layered so that the different colours in the designs could be cut from shades of fluorescent pink, yellow, blue and green vinyl and applied to a foamboard shape. Wandering through the series of teapots, mad-hatter hats, playing cards and chess pieces, with Cheshire Cats grinning out of the trees, made the Curious Fluorious event an exciting exploration of a classic story rendered large in a magical setting.