Certain objects can only be defined in relationships.
Take bookends, for instance, items made to keep a row of books upright. Some are clearly designed for that exclusive purpose, in an L shape that perfectly tucks under the books without much spectacle.
But find anything heavy enough – say a plant pot or a water bottle – and they too can fulfil the purpose of a bookend. Once placed there, these objects take on an additional identity, their nature determined by the surrounding items.
As part of Dundee Design Festival 2024, designers were invited to create bookends inspired by a book it might one day hold. The book in question was Dundee’s Two Intrepid Ladies: A Tour Around The World by Susan Keracher. It tells the real story of two journalists who, in 1894, were given the assignment to travel around the world and ‘mix with its people’. Marie Imandt and Bessie Maxwell took on what became known as The Ladies’ Tour, a trip that lasted for close to a year and generated several reports for the Courier and Weekly News.
Soorin Shin, one of 20 designers in this project, felt an immediate connection with the text. The Glasgow-based creative, originally from South Korea, often explores the way depictions of nature and the feminine are portrayed in culture. This lens of eco-feminism seemed appropriate to understanding the 1890s journey depicted in the book.
But as Shin read it, she worried that the connection might fade. She found herself asking ‘how are they going to look at people from different cultures? What if they start looking down on them?’ The concern was not unfounded. The premise of 19th Century British travellers writing about other cultures warrants a certain level of caution. How do they portray the countries they’ll visit? What assumptions would they make? How self-reflective would they be about Britain’s role in any of the things happening worldwide?
Meanwhile, another designer in the project was grappling with her own questions about the past. Jennifer Gray had decided that each bookend was going to be a sculpture of a woman’s hand holding a globe, a clear metaphor of the two journalists’ adventures.
That idea had its benefits, ‘I could make it about the women in the past and cast my own hand – that’s easier!’ But Gray didn’t want to simply make a historical monument, ‘rather than hark back to the past completely, the pieces had to open a dialogue to today […] I’m not trying to remake, I want to create something new.’
Gray’s solution was to look at the present. She invited two journalists, Gabriella Bennett and Eilidh Akilade into the process. Her bookend is made up of casts from both of their dominant hands, a celebration of the 19th Century writers but also an acknowledgement of writers today. She explains that it is about ‘continuing the dialogue between the past and the present. These objects are trigger points for discussion.’
The process of casting the two arms is long and intimate. Gray sat with the writers for hours talking about art, rehearsing positions and designing elements of the project together. Now, rather than a romanticising of women in the past, these sculptures speak to their relationship with the present and more intimately, for Jennifer, the bond built through the long hours with her models.
Engaging with writers today felt like the connection of a thread that would not have been there if the project had simply represented the past. There was now a link between writers then and writers now.
Meanwhile, Shin also wrestled with acknowledging the present while remembering the past…
The longer she sat with the book and considered its protagonists, the more she asked herself ‘what’s the point of me trying to pick on someone?’ Especially if that person came from such a different time and culture… then everything clicked into place.
Her relationship with the two journalists was, in some ways, like the relationship between the travellers and the cultures they visited. She was looking from the outside, making a judgement on women in a completely different context.
The task she was given did not feel too different from the journalists’ task of looking at women elsewhere and writing about them. She could assess from the outside or she could create her bookends with the ‘compassion and empathy’ that she hoped the writers had extended to the cultures they visited. Despite their many differences, all the women in this story had something in common. Shin chose to represent that commonality with a simple act: braiding hair.
Describing the action of braiding someone else’s hair as ‘very endearing and intimate, and it’s a very vulnerable position.’ The 3D printed creation looks like a braided crown, each bookend one half of the circle.
Shin explains, ‘I wanted for women to, when they realise it’s braiding, to remember that moment in the past when their mom braided their hair or a moment between sisters. I wanted this object to expand its presence… make people remember sights and memories and feel something. That connection between women.’
‘Sisterhood… that’s the main word.’
Eventually, what we make today will also be looked upon by observers who will add their chosen amounts of grace and judgement. Shin chose to remember the role she plays in that relationship.
Making sense of the past is a pointless exercise if it doesn’t lead to a more informed wisdom about the present. We are what came before us and what will come after, the connections we make with people around us and what we learn from other times in history.
People can only be defined in relationships.
Written by Sam Gonçalves