Witness — A modular exhibition guide for Susie MacMurray at the National Justice Museum.
Witness is an ambitious art installation created for the National Justice Museum in Nottingham. Long-term client, collaborator and friend of Cafeteria, Andrea Hadley-Johnson, invited us to craft the accompanying printed guide.
Artist Susie MacMurray was commissioned by The National Justice Museum to create a site-specific architectural installation in the brick-walled exercise yard of the museum, formerly a courthouse and prison. MacMurray’s work is a direct response to space, history and place.
The resulting sculpture comprises a row of five columns, seven feet high, in the centre of the yard. MacMurray and her team of assistants, hand-knitted each column in-situ, using manilla rope on a large bespoke rig, like a French Knitting doll. The loops around the tops nod to the noose that hangs from the mock-gallows in the yard.
This project required a simple, but poetic piece of print with a serious attention to detail, complementing Susie’s practice. Something that responded to the work and the place, without trying to replicate it.
The guide would be given out at a launch event, and then be available to buy in the museum’s shop. It needed to be robust enough to be handled and retain its appeal after the completion of the installation was marked.
We decided on a modular format made up of three distinct, but interrelated parts, each printed with a different process on contrasting, uncoated Fedrigoni paper stocks. Brown, red and off-white alluding to rope, brick and cloudy skies, echoing the experience of the sculpture in the yard. To accentuate the sense of verticality, we opted for narrowed A-sizes — A4, A5 and A6. The cover is the smallest section. Four pages of white ink printed on Nettuno Tabacco stock, the texture on the front created by reversing out a grayscale, macro image of the sculpture itself. The middle section consists of eight pages, home to an essay by arts writer, Javier Pes and Susie’s succinct artist biography. Words and accompanying images are printed black, on the Terra Rossa Materica, with the text set across a two-column grid, separated by a thin-stroked vertical rule. These two sections are saddle stitched with two copper wire staples.
The third and largest section is printed full colour on Arena Rough that reproduces images with the clarity and punch of a silkier paper. One side carries the title lock-up and museum’s press release. On the other, three abstract images of the materials and sculpture alongside quotes from the artist and museum representatives. The section is folded in half along its right-hand edge, so that the open left-hand edge inserts into the smaller booklet, creating a cheats ‘French fold’. When extracted the loose leaf opens out to a limited-edition poster presenting Witness in its totality.
Everything is packaged in a black string-tie ‘legal’ envelope, complete with two matt white foils — conceptually balancing the courthouse context and artistic process of winding threads.
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Witness by Susie MacMurray will remain in the former exercise yard at the National Justice Museum for the foreseeable. Exposed to the elements it will weather and change form over time. Copies of the guide we designed and delivered are now available for purchase in the museum shop.
We’d like to thank our Sheffield-based print partners, ASAP Digital for their can-do attitude and perseverance along the way.
