Ilona Gaynor tells us about her best and worst projects made at college

It’s tricky to put Ilona Gaynor into a specific art and design category. In a way she is a situation designer who invents plots and circumstances to explore complicated themes and ideas that are displayed like immaculately-designed premeditated detective stories.

She’s also one of this year’s Designers in Residence at the Design Museum and a graduate from the Royal College of Art. We hold her work in the highest regard, but we all know portfolios are a mixture of highs and lows. As part of our Back To School month we asked Ilona to share her best and worst project from her time at the RCA. Here she is…

The Royal College of Art had much more of an impact on my work then my former undergraduate study and I would say in general I enjoyed my time there. If you’re lucky enough to get the chance to, I’d recommend getting your brains squashed and your heart ripped out. I actually had a lot of resentment about my experience after graduating for various reasons – my work was perhaps misunderstood by tutors or secretly liked.

I’m still four years out and none the wiser. It was hard and if you didn’t really believe in the course’s direction or way of thinking it became a bit of battlefield; a lonely one, which is something that I think occurs often in art school as students often land on either side of the fence and it’s up to them to make it work to their advantage.

Through all of those challenges and disagreements, my work developed a unique perspective and style that became a tool for authorship and intrigue. Rather bizarrely, the course’s direction the year after I graduated took an acute shift in my previously turbulent direction and methodology and is still heading that way today. My experience also carved a pathway for The Department of No, which as a studio positions the work I do as a niche industrious practice. In hindsight I owe a great deal to the tensions and actually named the studio after them.

A lot of the work I did while at university wasn’t a great success, although I perhaps never saw my work in those terms.

I did a really (really) terrible project for a brief on exploring synthetic biology as a design medium. It was a subject that for some reason I irrationally resisted; I couldn’t find a way in and I’ve always loathed organic things or shapes – it all seemed a bit messy and earthy. The project was called A Life after a Death. It proposed the kinship between a dead me, whom was forever held in stasis as a household plant that was engineered to grow less organically over time. The plant would torment its owners by releasing toxins into the air or shed its leaves, when unsatisfied with lighting conditions, levels of water in the soil or levels of cigarette smoke detected in the air.

I suppose it was a critique on the synthetic biology trend in art and design, but it also just didn’t work; it was shallow and I just couldn’t get a grip with the subject. The entire project was a failure – to my knowledge I don’t think any of the tutors were amused either.  

The most successful project is something that still gets shown in exhibitions around the world. The project was called Everything Ends in Chaos – it was my final MA piece that went on to win the Sir Ridley Scott Award, which set up my practice financially upon leaving the RCA. Briefly, the project set out to design a Black Swan as a global financial catastrophe, which to all intents and purposes is an impossible task.

The work was presented as a war room table accompanied by films that map out the people, objects and places implicated in the unfolding plot. The narrative is anchored around the kidnapping of a wealthy woman and details the various actuary, financial implications brought upon these systems to coincide with the violence and misery bestowed upon the kidnapped woman. The characters and plot twists in the piece were manoeuvred using insurance as a tool to change the stakes, all of which were designed with a jury of stock-brokers, insurance brokers and underwriters to calculate the biggest financial gains and losses.

I’m still unsure to this day whether this project was successful for an audience or more successful for me as a designer or artist. It’s an incredibly complicated piece of work and I still feel it should have either been written as a novel or made as a feature length film, rather then exist in a gallery. The reaction to the work was really varied: I was called “heartless” by one visitor to the exhibition, someone also called it “delightfully psychopathic,”however the comments in general were very mixed. Some thought it was comedic, others not.
 
But it switched on something, connected the dots as to the way I think. I think it also gave me the ammunition to turn this way of thinking into a consultancy and to further my artistic practice at the same time. 

For me the most important work comes after art school rather then made within it, and I think it’s what you do when you leave that sets a standard and process for more expansive projects.

Back to School
Throughout the month of October we’ll be celebrating the well-known autumnal feeling of Back to School. The content this month will be focusing on fresh starts, education, learning tools and the state of art school in the world today – delivered to you via fantastic in-depth interviews, features and conversations with talented, relevant, creative people.