Scene

The Hidden Art team caught up with Scene, recent winners of the Hidden Art Award for Best Appearance at a Trade Show / Exhibition, to discuss their show and being Hidden Art members. With their ‘Scene at Crib 5’ exhibition such as success, we sat down with Gemma Fabbri and Chris Ager to find out more about the company.

 

 

Gemma: It’s fabulous, I feel really pleased about that.

Chris: It was quite a shock really; we weren’t expecting to win.

Gemma: No we weren’t expecting it. But it was really nice because we go to an awful lot of effort to collaborate with many different creative people, and we were competing with much bigger names and bigger events.

Chris: There were bigger events and bigger shows. The nice thing about winning is that we felt we won because of the whole purpose of the show. The reason behind the show was to present a collection of different people doing different types of work. It wasn’t a show about furniture and it wasn’t a show about film. That’s what was nice about it, to win for that reason was what made it special.

 

Chris: It was a statement, because we come from quite a corporate/commercial background but we have interests beyond that. One thing we used to get frustrated about was when you design within the corporate commercial background (which is our bread and butter work) it is all about processes; someone has to build something and someone has got a certain amount of money to build it. You have to go through all of these processes, which are about doing it in the formulaic way. The construction industry has become a blame culture, so the love of creating something because a team of people want to do it has pretty much disappeared. Now it is about saving each other’s skin, ticking the right boxes and making sure you do the right thing. Therefore, people like those exhibiting with us don’t really get involved with that side of things. On the night of our party we invited people we still work with from the construction industry, they were seeing stuff and talking to people that they don’t normally get the opportunity to.

Gemma: It makes people stop and think outside of what they do day to day. If you put people from different professions in an environment where there are things they haven’t really considered before, they so start to think about it within their work. They can think about including a piece of art, or a certain table, that wouldn’t normally enter their mind.

Chris: People become responsible for the part of the project they are involved with, rather than sitting down and thinking about what it could be. It has become a weird sequence of events.

Gemma: The other nice thing is when members of the public came in when we were working in here. Crib 5 are a furniture dealer and they don’t just do commercial projects, they do domestic projects. But people don’t really know they are here. You aren’t going to get somebody into this building off the street to buy furniture, unless they know of Crib 5.

 

 

Gemma: Our philosophy is about being inspired by everything that is around us.

Chris: It’s the idea that you don’t have to know everything about every aspect of what you work on. You can use other people; they can be specialists or professionals in certain fields. The benefit of doing that is that you can end up working with a group of people who are absolutely brilliant at what they do. When you bring those people together you are bound to end up with something better than the original design.

Gemma: That’s the idea of our inspiration constellation, with Scene at Crib5 that was the start of it. Its something we talked about what the company would be in the beginning. When you collaborate with people on big projects, along the way you find so many hidden stars that you never knew existed.

 

 

Chris: What was lovely about the Hidden Art awards evening is that you where suddenly in a room looking at all of these faces of people who actually care about what they are doing. There are other awards were you are in a room full of people who are just there to have a release from the day-to-day pressures. It’s great fun, but nothing compares to knowing that the reason people are there is because they love what they are doing. That’s what is special about the Hidden Art Awards.

Gemma: Hidden Art also puts us in a position to meet those rising stars we have been talking about. It is refreshing to walk away from this environment and put yourself in a room with people who are doing exciting things; it makes you love hearing about them. It gets you excited. The other great thing about Hidden Art is that there is always something you can think about getting involved in. There’ll be an update on so many projects, and open studios; it’s good to know what is going on out there.

Chris: I think it is one of those things that support the notion of people being credible and creative. It’s about making the effort to develop and help those people, and celebrating that. It focuses on the people rather than thinking only about selling or producing. It is an environment that makes interesting things happen, it’s not a commercial environment.

Gemma: And it’s not pretentious either. Art and design can end up being about who you know, what you know and who you hang out with. Hidden Art is the complete opposite.