XL Recordings
Photography | Craft | Design | Print
Renown British record label, XL Recordings, asked to illustrate a past event in XL history. I chose to illustrate the Vision rave at Popham Airfield in 1992. This was the ultimate dance festival show, with a multi-marquee spectacular for 35 000 people, intended as a showcase for the dance acts on the label. It set a new record as the biggest tented rave in history. It also made national news for having been gate-crashed by 10,000 people.
I wanted to find a way to illustrate the volume and energy of the crowd gatecrashing the festival - jumping fences and barriers to gain entry and swarming into one place. The final piece consists of 10,000 pins, hand placed over 6 days, which are symbolic to the volume of people that gatecrashed the rave. The pins are placed around the year ‘1992’, set in the same typeface that was used on the original flyer, when the event took place. I photographed the final piece in natural light, using different angles of the pins to convey more energy as if under the lights of the arena.
- D&AD Pencil Nomination 2014
