Lullatone make music with raindrops, xylophones out of paper rolls and they also make me very happy.

I took my ideas to meet their ideas. And we played…and played...
 

What kind of ideas do you get from playing?

We learn a lot about new ways to do things – ways that are more fun, and more magical. Hopefully sometimes that magic falls into our recording too. Like, playing a xylophone with bouncing super balls or playing drums in the bathtub.

 

What do you do in your workshops? 

We teach kids how to make instruments from things around the house like balloon bongos, cardboard castanets and paper roll xylophones. But, we also get them to think about new instruments on their own, using the materials we have laying around.

Then... we have a super fun jam session together!
 

Could you imagine a day when you ran out ideas? What would you do?

I really can't imagine that day ever coming, but... I guess... we would... try to find some friends with a lot of ideas and get influenced by them.

There was one thing at my exhibition that everybody scrambled to get in line for. And that was the googly-eyed cookies and idea bicuits.

They were made by my friend Orlando who bakes cakes, brownies, buns and tarts. She then takes delicious photographs and puts them on her blog Projekt Puderzucker.

She has to do all this when she gets home from school though. Because Orlando is seventeen.

I asked her how she learnt to bake and she explained that she taught herself.
There is no amazing little trick, no little secret button I can tell you about that one can press and then you think "Oh! lets make cakes & cookies" and they actually turn out yum.
My grandfather is good at making cakes but it was never a "watch and learn" process. He always had them there and ready to eat. I never got to see him make any. Maybe it's in the genes?

Where do you ideas come from?
Inspiration is all around me. When somebody asks me to make cookies or cake I usually have one or two weeks until I need to come up with an idea. So i think about it...
The good thing is that I get to go to school and am forced to use my brain on a daily basis. Most of my inspiration comes when I am in school. Either the teacher says something that sparks my cake imagination or I am so bored that I drift off and have a flash of genius.
The problem then lies in transferring the idea of the taste, texture, colour, shape and detail onto lined paper with only a blunt pencil or a smudgy fountain pen with purple ink!

What do you want to do when you finish school?
Both my parents have worked freelance in creative jobs for the largest part of their lives. I grew up with that, so I could not imagine doing anything other. I don‘t know if it will turn out to be cake for the rest of my life, but I don't mind getting my hands dirty and never doing the same thing twice. Or at least not in exactly the same way.
I would like to study design. But at the moment the easiest way to express my creativity is by baking. Butter, eggs, flour and sugar are cheaper than most other working materials. And I must say the feedback is very gratifying.

Photographs by Orlando Lovell. Join her baking adventures on facebook.

I made a lot of new friends with a lot of ideas at my exhibition. We talked about ideas for books. Zoe wants to write a book about horses, and Maya about the solar system.

Inu was so inspired that she wrote a book that afternoon. It's called "We Love Lions" and is about a strong lion who wears underpants. It is fantastic!

Elea is writing a book about a girl called Elea who has a magic spider. I can't wait to read it!

Pictures of me by Elea, Marta, Anoushka and Natascha. 

If you've read my book you'll know the end of the story. You'll know I beat that big paper beast made of crumpled attempts to finish my ideas.

And if you came to my exhibition you will have seen me. Up there, on top of that beast, reading my book every day.

You couldn't come? Let's visit now!

Film: Colorado
Music: Lullatone

Me and my ideas are taking over Berlin in April, with an exhibition at BOLD as part of the Pictoplasma Character Walk.

You'll find screenprints, drawings, wooden idea toys, woolen toys and maybe even me. But best of all my friend Orlando is baking cookies which you can enjoy while listening to my story.

Her Idea Exhibition
BOLD Berlin
Torstr. 68

Opening Reception
April 6 19-22h

Opening Hours
April 6-10 12-20h
April 11-29 Mr-Fr 12-18h

Book Readings (allow 15 minutes)
April 6 & 10 16h30
April 7, 8 & 9 19h15

Last time I met Andrea Kang we sat in the sun. But this time we wandered through the woods and our footsteps stayed in the snow. It made me think about seasons changing and growing up....

I asked Andrea what she'd have thought at age eight if she had known that one day she would be making cute plush owls for her Harley and Boss collaboration and people would admire her paper cut illustrations in galleries? Or that she would be designing toys for brands like Care Bears and Mr. Potato Head? 

"I would have thought that I was really cool and bragged about it to all my other eight year old friends" she laughed.

How different are your ideas now, from the ideas you had then?
Though my skill level has changed, a lot of the ideas I produce are very similar to thoughts from my childhood. I have a large collection of drawings and diaries dating as far back to when I was 3 years old that I reference occasionally. Bears, cute animals, little girls and odd creatures still feature prominently in my work today.

Every year the seasons cycle by. How does that affect you and your ideas?
If I'm creating an exhibition of personal work the seasons do play a role in my thought processes. Living in New England, I'm fortunate to see distinct seasonal changes throughout the year. Subtle things like the afternoon light, color changes in the vegetation and the way people react to weather variations all provide a jumping off point for different concepts and narratives.

When do you have the most ideas?
I think I have more ideas in the summer, something about the vitamin D recharges me. When it comes to finishing more things, definitely would be the winter months. The cold is quite intense here which forces me to hibernate and focus on creating.

Meet Nille Svensson. Nille's design and art seems so effortless that I want to BE him. I donned a beard to see if that is where the secret lay. It turns out that there is more to it.

Nille handed me a sledgehammer and I asked him what to break.
First thing is to try to reverse the thought of designing in order to meet expectations. Too much time is spent by creatives to make things be "like" something. Try to think out of the given categories. If you create a book cover that doesn't look like a book cover, embrace that. From that moment it will be what a book cover may look like.

Oh Sozi, you look confused. What I mean is, don't get too preoccupied with fitting in to design culture, try to add to it instead, enrich it. Be grateful for every idea your mind comes up with and squeeeeeeze it into your work, if that is what it takes.

How did you change the way you worked to make your Fake China?
How is it different to your other projects?
It is different because I choose the medium before working on the concept or the design. I got invited to be part of an exhibition and all I knew was that I wanted to create ceramic plates. After deciding on that I tried to come up with a concept and design that would be suitable.

I think that working in a medium or a field that you haven't worked in before frees up a lot of creative energy, you can't be an expert on something you've never done before so you just lower your expectations to a healthy low level. And working with materials or methods that you haven't tried before is so refreshing and fulfilling in itself so you're bound to get excited about what you are doing, even if the result isn't spectacular. It is just a way to inject curiosity and discovery into your creative process.

But what if you fail? Is that ok?
Samuel Beckett thought it was cool to fail but I don't. I think we have very good intuitive ways of knowing what we have to do in order to succeed. What I mean is that I think that we often know beforehand that we are creating circumstances for ourselves that almost inevitably will lead to failure. If you do something that you are positively convinced will work and it unexpectedly blows up in your face, that's ok. That's not failing, it is just shit happening to you. But if you, against better judgement, compromise with your creative conditions the failure that might ensue just isn't ok.

One idea may be done, but there are so many more! I decided it was time to visit my friend in his laboratory and examine those ideas… in detail.

 

Andy is a Microbiologist. He researches bacteria and how they behave in the environments where they live – in the soil, plants or even inside us!  He says the bacterial world "challenges us to describe and understand it." 

 

Above all, Andy is a problem solver – thinking up and designing experiments and analysing the results. 

 

But Andy didn't always do this. He didn't even like Biology at school. Though when the idea came to him at age 32, he decided to just DO it!

 

We put an idea under the microscope and I asked him what he thought it was made of...

Reflection, intuition and good judgement. I am very aware of the unforeseen implications of an idea for other areas or ideas. The start for me is often an intuitive recognition of a problem. Problems rarely present themselves in their most fruitful form straight off. More difficult problems require good knowledge and time for reflection. I find focus through writing notes, reading, internal dialogues, talking to others about it, going away and coming back. 

 

Do you like new ideas or finished ideas best of all?

I like finished ideas best. I like the start, identifying problems and designing experiments. I accept the middle which is the implementation of the experiment. I really enjoy the final stage of analysing the results and teasing out the ideas. Most ideas, however, do not make the full journey and sometimes I have to let them go.

 

How do you finish them?

I write about them for publication. The really substantial ideas are rarely truly finished. But tremendous progress has been made in the last 20 years and I am very happy to be in the thick of it all.