Between 1998 and 2000, my work was selected for a British Council touring exhibition of recent Royal College of Art graduates, travelling internationally as a representation of emerging British art and design.
For me, the selection felt like a breakthrough.
But the work that achieved it had begun as an experiment in something rather more uncomfortable: what kinds of visual language were being recognised as serious contemporary design?
Plastic, Pattern and Permission
During my years at the Royal College of Art, I had been developing an extensive body of experiments with plastics.
I printed, flocked, embossed, stitched, laminated and layered industrial polymers. I was interested in transforming their surfaces and challenging the expectation that plastic should be monochrome, immaculate, industrial and “shiny and new.”
Yet I was conscious that the aspects of the work that most interested me—pattern, colour, decoration and the transformation of industrial plastic through processes associated with textiles—did not always sit comfortably within the prevailing language of product and industrial design.
I remember giving a lecture to Design Products students in which the combination of plastics and pattern provoked unexpectedly strong reactions.
It made me think.
What would happen if, instead of asking the design culture around me to recognise the language I was already developing, I temporarily adopted a language it already knew how to recognise?
I decided to conduct an experiment.
I would make what I thought of, somewhat mischievously, as a man’s sculpture.
Borrowing the Skylon
I looked back to the 1951 Festival of Britain and selected one of its most recognisable structures: the Skylon.
The original Skylon was a spectacular vertical structure on London’s South Bank, almost ninety metres high and pointed at both ends. Suspended above the ground, clad in aluminium and illuminated internally at night, it embodied an optimistic post-war language of engineering, technology and British modernity.
It also seemed to me an extraordinarily masculine form.
Tall, metallic, aerodynamic and emphatically vertical, it represented precisely the visual territory from which my patterned plastic experiments appeared to be excluded.
So I appropriated it.
For an interim exhibition in the RCA’s Upper Gulbenkian Gallery in December 1997–January 1998, I made a series of miniature inflatable Skylons in PVC.
Rather than reproducing the original structure literally, I translated it through the material language I had been developing throughout my research. The forms were inflatable rather than rigid, embossed rather than mechanically pristine, and surfaced with muted metallic colours and textures.
The result contained a contradiction I enjoyed.
The silhouette belonged to heroic modernism.
The surface belonged to me.
Recognition
The response was striking.
The Mini Skylons immediately attracted the attention of Ron Arad and Daniel Charny, and the work was subsequently selected for the British Council/Royal College of Art touring exhibition.
I found the sequence difficult to ignore.
Years of experiments in patterned, printed and embellished plastics had struggled to find an obvious place within the dominant languages of product design. When I reformulated those investigations through a recognisably modernist, vertical and conventionally masculine object, the work became legible almost immediately.
The material processes had not fundamentally changed.
The visual code had.
That experience has stayed with me because it raised a question extending well beyond this particular exhibition:
Who gets to decide what serious design looks like?
And, perhaps more importantly, what forms of knowledge become visible once something adopts the visual language through which authority is already recognised?
Softening the Monument
Looking back, I am interested in the fact that the Mini Skylons were not actually as obedient to that language as they initially appeared.
The original Skylon depended upon engineering, rigidity, height and the illusion of structural weightlessness. My versions were made from flexible PVC and air.
They could be inflated.
They could soften.
They could deflate.
Their metallic surfaces suggested industrial precision while embossing, colour and texture disrupted it.
The monumental had become multiple and miniature.
The rigid had become flexible.
The architectural had become something approaching textile.
What began as an attempt to mirror an accepted masculine visual language therefore also quietly destabilised it.
I had borrowed the form, but transformed its material behaviour.
Sculpture, Screen or Light?
The Mini Skylons were also deliberately ambiguous objects.
Grouped together, the repeated forms could operate as a screen. Their translucency and internal illumination allowed them to be understood as lights. At the trade presentation they could therefore move between sculpture, product, furnishing and installation.
I was increasingly interested in precisely this instability.
Was I making sculpture?
Was I making a textile?
Was I designing an object?
Was I constructing a surface?
I had entered the Royal College from 3D Design and plastics, moved into Constructed Textiles, and was continually discovering that the categories surrounding my work were less fluid than the materials themselves.
The Mini Skylons allowed those categories to collide.
From the RCA to the British Council
The work was subsequently selected for an international British Council exhibition of Royal College of Art graduates, touring between 1998 and 2000.
I was one of a relatively small number of women represented and the only woman selected from Textiles.
At the time, the opportunity mattered enormously. The work was leaving the environment in which it had been made and entering an international account of contemporary British art and design.
Yet what interests me more now is the mechanism through which that visibility had occurred.
I had changed the code.
Pattern, surface, colour and textile processes remained within the work, but I had placed them inside a form already carrying the authority of British modernism, architecture, engineering and post-war design.
Suddenly they could travel.
The Politics of the Surface
This experience altered the way I understood decoration.
Pattern is sometimes treated as something applied to an object after its important decisions have already been made: structure first, decoration afterwards.
My experience suggested something different.
Surface carries cultural information.
Colour carries cultural information.
Materials carry cultural information.
Even geometry carries assumptions about seriousness, gender, technology and value.
The same material experiment could be interpreted differently according to the form through which it was presented.
This became increasingly important to my later work.
Rather than accepting a division between a supposedly serious structure and a supplementary decorative surface, I became interested in what happens when surface itself carries the argument.
A British Plastic Language
There was another reason the Skylon interested me.
My research into plastics had made me increasingly aware of the way synthetic materials became intertwined with twentieth-century ideas of modernity. The Festival of Britain was particularly important in constructing a public image of post-war British design in which new materials, engineering and technological optimism could stand for a future society.
The original Skylon was perhaps the most spectacular expression of that ambition. It was designed by architects Powell and Moya with engineer Felix Samuely and became the emblematic vertical feature of the South Bank Exhibition.
By the late 1990s, I was looking at that history from another position.
Plastic was no longer simply the miraculous material of the future. Its industrial ubiquity and environmental persistence were becoming increasingly apparent.
My Mini Skylons therefore contained two moments in the history of modern materials at once: the optimism attached to technological progress and my own developing interest in what happens when those materials are patterned, handled, feminised, aged and made culturally complicated.
Becoming Visible
The British Council tour gave the work a visibility I had wanted.
But it also taught me something about visibility itself.
An artist does not work outside existing systems of recognition. Institutions, disciplines and professions already possess visual languages through which some things are immediately understood as important while others remain harder to place.
Sometimes the artist refuses those languages.
Sometimes she works around them.
And sometimes she enters them deliberately in order to discover what happens from inside.
That was what I did with the Mini Skylons.
I took a form associated in my mind with masculine modernism and technological authority and filled it with the material vocabulary I had already been developing: flexible plastic, repetition, colour, surface and pattern.
The strategy worked.
But the lesson I carried forward was not that I should continue making work that resembled masculine modernist design.
It was that recognition itself has a visual language.
Learning to recognise that language gave me greater freedom to decide when to inhabit it, when to transform it and when to leave it behind.
Exhibition & Tour
Mini Skylons
Emma Neuberg
1997–98
Inflatable and embossed PVC with metallic colour, texture and light.
Initially developed for an interim exhibition at the Royal College of Art’s Upper Gulbenkian Gallery, London, December 1997–January 1998.
Subsequently selected for an international British Council exhibition of Royal College of Art graduates, touring 1998–2000.
The work was initially presented in multiples, allowing it to operate between sculpture, screen, lighting, textile surface and product.