Poly 2021

This is how the WRK Studio in Dortmund
came into being in 2014. For the past four years
Andrea Weber and Damoun Tamir have been
jointly developing projects for magazines or
institutions there: things like detailed editorial
designs, the appearance of a new Google Doodle,
or elaborate Wimmel posters for the FIFA
Football Museum in Zurich. Most of their work
is created in analogue form. When a new order
comes in, materials are selected and the initial
sketches are drawn on paper in a pleasantly
old-fashioned way.
also likes using peanut flips to model a brain, or
shaping cauliflower into cigarette smoke, and pine
needles into long eyelashes.
For German Railways’ magazine they
created a series with popcorn. Their aim was to
create typical film motifs. But just how to do this
proved difficult. In the end the material shrank
in a rather unattractive manner. In projects like
this things have to be done quickly, but if you’re
thinking up bath slippers made from slices of
aubergine you also have to be able to deal with
the fact that vegetables change colour. That’s
“The fact that you can quickly delete,
copy or move things on the computer
bores me. I prefer to have a piece of
paper in front of me.”
Damoun Tamir
The designers then set up a mood board
to give the client a first impression. Afterwards,
they quickly get to work. Their stock of materials
is chock-full of different papers, glue, colours and
plasticine. Of course, they don’t build everything
on a one-to-one scale. For the bigger you build,
the less you can see of the structure and surface
character of the paper later on. Once the object
is completed, it is photographed, and later sent to
the computer for digital reworking; for example to
bring the colours into line.
In this way, over the past few years,they
have created impressive works in paper and
papier-mâché. In their student days, for example,
they made a poster for a Charles Bukowski
reading featuring spilled canned beer, flies and
a full ashtray. Everything was made of paper,
even the cigarette ends. Then there was a rosy
papier-mâché chicken for the magazine “Business-Punk”,
and a bottle of “Union” beer for the
Dortmund “Heimatdesign” magazine. That said,
Damoun Tamir started off with meat, which she
absolutely wanted to work with at some point
during her studies - and almost failed. She’s a
vegetarian. So not only the processing, but also
the procurement of chicken hearts and a sheep’s
head proved to be something of a problem. Nowadays
she prefers to work with alternatives. WRK
how you gain experience. And in the best case,
how you can pass on the knowledge gained.
Since 2017, Damoun Tamir has been teaching in
the design department at Dortmund University
of Applied Sciences and Arts. In her seminars
she demonstrates how this can be done with
tactile-illustrative designs...and how to best push
talented people in the right direction.
→ WRK-DESIGN.DE
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