The Cashel brothers creating illustrations for publications across the world from their base in Churchfield
The Project Twins have illustrated everything from Donald Trump to 9/11 and the coronavirus. During the pandemic they turned to flowers for a new exhibition now showing in Hen's Teeth Store.
Flower Power
James and Michael Fitzgerald have been based at Sample-Studios for nearly as long as they have been The Project Twins. In that time their work has grown in size - the move to the Northside helped in that regard - but you’ll find their aesthetically paired down illustrations in The New York Times, The Economist, Nature, almost weekly in the Guardian Weekend, and in Foreign Affairs, the bible of foreign policy, at least in the English language anyway, as well as in numerous trade and B2B magazines.
The twin brothers from Cashel are busy.
For the next few weeks if you’re in Dublin you’ll find new work from the Project Twins at Bláth, Bláth, Bláth in Hen's Teeth Store. The new exhibition features a series of prints made from woodblocks and printed on Japanese paper which they created at Cork Printmakers.
The prints in their new exhibition are in keeping with the Project Twins aesthetic which might be neatly summed up as simple is best. (Simple is also often the hardest thing to get right - which might point to why haikus are so hard to perfect). At a base and abstract level the prints are premised on flowers with icons worked into them. The brothers had started on the designs at some stage in the pandemic and finished them off at the Printmakers, but it’s only now that they’re seeing the light of the day.
The idea for the flower-themed prints came together during the pandemic.
“It's kind of mixing that digital element with nature,” Micheal said. The images were made really fast on computer, and they mixed a dose of anxiety - an emotion that defined the pandemic - into them with the addition of small icons. But then the process slowed right down when it came to assembling the pieces before printing them on Japanese paper.
The icons - some of them are emojis - also feature on the giant hand painted tarpaulins that they will be exhibiting in the Crypt underneath St Luke’s, one of the exhibition spaces that Sample-Studios has access to.
“When we started painting these giant tarpaulins we wanted to break up the work to have more going on in the canvas,” Micahel said.
The Crypt exhibition is slated to open in September even though the earliest piece in that exhibition dates back to when they moved with Sample-Studios across both channels of the River Lee, up Wolfe Tone Street and down the back end of an industrial estate in Churchfield, next to a sprawling recycling centre where all the contents of our wheelie bins are shipped in and out of.
Sample one
It’s all a long way from Sullivan’s Quay and James still clearly misses the old Sample-Studios. Based in the old FÁS building and Tax office that were demolished a few years back, Sample-Studios was that rare thing that it almost seems improbable - especially now in a period of hyperinflation and crazy rents.
Here was a building in the middle of the city run by artists for artists that housed creativity, exhibitions, pranks and pretension, drinking sessions and gigs that were clearly gigs but were sound art experiments when the Gardaí showed up. Admittedly that’s a reductive epitaph of what was Sample-Studios version one, but damn if it didn’t sound like the ideal artistic venue for young and emerging artists who were nearly all short on cash, but high on life, ideas, enthusiasm and likely other things too.
“There was a lot of like mid-week drinking and going to exhibitions mid-week,” Micheal said.
James recalls that back in the real early days of Sample-Studios there was nearly always something going on in the studios. Altered Hours had taken up a kind of residency in the music room, there was always people hanging out in the tea room and when you came out of a club or pub in the small hours of the morning you’d look across the Grand Parade to see if the lights were on over at Sullivan’s Quay. And invariably they were.
“You’d pop up for a look and there’d be a load of people in there drinking cans. There’d always be something good going on. It was good craic,” James said.
To wit, a conversation about things that are decidedly less craic: the state of rents and accommodation in Ireland. On a more upbeat note, our conversation then moved to the new basic income program announced by the government and promised to 2,000 artists.
“I don't know what we're going to figure out from this trial (that they don’t already know)?” James asked.
“You know, you have a bunch of poor people and you’re giving them money. What will you figure out that you don’t know? You’ll figure out that giving them money helped them. I don’t see what else you’re going to figure out,” James said.
The brothers have sympathy and empathy for artists just coming out of college trying to make ends meet in an industry that has always been tough to make a living in. Add in the housing and accommodation crisis and it sounds gloomier than it has been in generations.
When the Project Twins got started more than ten years ago Ireland was still in recession. As Michael said, everyone they knew was on the dole, “even people who should have proper jobs like were all on the dole.”
So, in a way there was less pressure and likely less comparison and less judgement Michael admits.
In fact, when they got going as a creative unit they had dole support for two years.
The pair had come back from travelling separately at just around the same time the arse had fallen out of the Celtic Tiger. Micheal thinks he landed back in Cork in 2008 the same day Ireland was declared bankrupt. They knocked around for a while doing up posters and freelance gigs. They did some work for the Cork Film Festival when it was still run by Mick Hannigan and Una Feely, and they ended up going down the route of illustration and graphic design when they got on a program that allowed them to keep their dole money for two years as well as any money earned though work. The second year they got 50% of their dole.
But it was one particularly clever exhibition back in 2011 that on hindsight did a lot of the heavy lifting to get The Project Twins a global audience without them even releasing it.
For Design Week 2011 in Dublin they created a A Visual Alphabet-Dictionary of Unusual Words that was shown at Mad Gallery.
As Michael explains it the concept was to take something complex and distil it into a kind of clever image.
I asked the pair if they could recall any of the 26 unusual words from the exhibition and what followed was a long pause before James finally remembered one. There’s a reason the words are called unusual; they might also be called hard to remember.
Included in the words they chose to illustrate were: quockerwodger, ultracrepidarian and welter.
James finally recalled ultracrepidarian: A person who gives opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge. Or basically everyone on Twitter!
But it was the afterlife of that exhibition that led to the Project Twins gaining a worldwide audience. The first thing that happened is their website crashed as visitors poured in to see their work.
Hundreds of design blogs and sites linked or shared their work and they also started getting calls from ad agencies looking to commission them.
Back to school
When it comes to commissions and illustrations the brothers work in tandem, and less as two parties coming from distinctive backgrounds trying to reach a creative harmony.
“Like after a while I'd have no idea if I made it or James made it,” Michael says at one stage of our interview while talking about their creative process.
“In a way, it's not really a collaboration. It's one kind of piece of work like shared authorship. It's like it's kind of one voice almost,” James said.
In their studio space up in Sample-Studios in Churchfield the brothers keep a stock of sketch pads. When a commission comes in via one of their agents, or from elsewhere, they’ll usually read the full article of what they’ll be illustrating, or if the deadline is looming they might only have a summary to work off.
Separately, they’ll start to outline crude and simple illustrations in their sketchbooks almost immediately, James on one side of the desk, Micheal on the other, and then together they’ll come up with a rough draft of where they want it to go before moving to illustrate using computer software.
They’ve been doing this process now for quite a few years so that there‘s a rhythm to how they work. The afternoon I called up they were finishing up an illustration for a Danish publication. Later that week, readers in Denmark would be coming across a simple illustration created in a white-walled corner of Churchfield. The commissions from publications come thick and fast and the process is not unlike journalism: it’s head down until you get the job done and hit the deadline. Nonetheless, it’s an impressive roster of publications the duo have designed for.
Now that international travel is back on the cards the pair will be on the move back and forth between Dusseldorf for work. A few years back they got an email out of the blue asking them to come on board as part of a substantial project that will see an old building in the city transformed into a secondary school.
The email inviting them on board - they didn’t have to tender and were included in the project from almost day one - could have come about from two school projects they have previously been involved in, one in Bray and the other closer to home at Bunscoil Rinn an Chabhlaigh in Rusbrooke. For that project they installed nearly 200 panels of flag motifs on the exterior of the school, in keeping with the maritime history of the seaside town.
The scale and size of the Dusseldorf project is unlike anything they’ve undertaken.
“It doesn't need to be finished until the summer of 2025. That's when the school opens. So we've got time to work on it,” Michael says.
In the meantime expect to see a lot more work by The Project Twins in Cork and in publications around the world.
Bláth, Bláth, Bláth by the Project Twins is at the Hen’s Teeth Store in Dublin 8 until May 14 and prints are also available for sale online.
