Rosemary Ferrier

unison banner

2011-10-05T23:35:00.000-07:00

This is a banner I was recently commissioned to design for Unison. Above is my original design, which was cut from coloured paper. The design is a nod to traditional trade union banners. Below are photos of the banner itself, which was made by Ed Hall, a renowned and well respected banner maker (more on him here). These were taken just before and during the October 1st march through Glasgow, through rain like you have never seen.

I have never been so wet in my entire life.

Kristoff's Circles

2011-10-05T15:54:00.002-07:00

An illustrated story about my imaginary friend, Kristoff, an octopus with hypnotic abilities and a rather unhealthy taste for power.

decorating

2011-10-05T15:54:00.001-07:00

Look at me! I can sew!

The Co-operative Programme

2011-10-05T15:53:00.002-07:00

When not eating or drawing I co-host a radio show on subcity. We've interviewed a lot of interesting people and played some excellent music. There are also a lot of really good links on the blog. Go and have a look.

I didn't make this. But I did photograph it in its natural habitat . . .

D&AD Comp

2011-10-05T15:53:00.000-07:00

Response to a competition brief to try and find a way to sell hp workstations to ~~gullible fools~~ creatives. This is an advert for a magazine, or maybe a billboard, or a beermat or something.

Wine

2011-10-05T15:51:00.000-07:00

This is a label for wine grown in a family friend's vineyard. The piece above was an earlier version.

Roads

2011-10-05T15:50:00.000-07:00

A couple of drawings done for a friend's zine. This top one is the M74 as seen from Cowcaddens. The motorway has ruined Glasgow's infrastructure for pedestrians, and cuts the centre of the town off in one neat, cruel swoop. But the structures supporting it are kind of impressive, if you like that kind of thing.
Which I kind of do.


This drawing describes a journey that we made back home from Skye after new year's eve a couple of years ago. The snow was the heaviest I can remember in my lifetime. It took us all day, creeping along quiet ice laden roads, listening to an OMD tape I'd brought for the ride up and sitting under a heavy duvet on the back seat. It was the best car ride ever.

Here the accompanying text, by David McCallum.

2nd January

The Kodak Funsaver – a plastic and cardboard 39 exposure disposable camera – comes with the advice that the subject should be 4 to 11.5ft (1,2 to 3,5m) from the photographer.

Beyond 11.5ft everything will be out of focus presumably, or poorly defined. Beyond 11.5ft everything is snow. All the difference between land and water is cancelled. The snow describes everything by shape and ignores its substance or state, and distances change. Lochs are flat spaces of white. Furthest away, huge shapes become textures and huge mountains seem closer. Gullies and jags in the hillsides are folds and creases in a smooth continuous surface, and patches of forest look fuzzy and soft in miniature. These mountains are long term companions, following the car for miles and turning slowly away. They will scarcely seem real when the photos come back.

Distance is a function of seeing mountains – to be near a mountain is to be on it. The car is constantly on the side of a hill or mountain, near the bottom but above flat glens or white lochs, crossing to a slope on the other side. In the camera's ideal range are conifers sagging with splatter shapes of show, white steep up or downhills, solid hard rivers, and running or staring deer. These go past so quickly that they will be blurs in the photographs.

The camera's parameters also exclude the Fiat's interior: Sam's right hand profile (knees under a duvet like the rest of us in the back); car's left hand b-pillar; the backs of black front seats – Kate in the passenger (quarter perspective), the windscreen and the dashboard controls mainly blocked by Neil's driver seat; right hand b-pillar; the rear right window and the wrong-way road surface; and coats on the parcel shelf. All of these things will be unclear obstructions.

The best way to make a photograph timeless is to remove cars and people and buildings, and the easiest way to date a photo is by looking at its cars because they're the shortest lived of these things.

Being in the back seat of a car, there is a childish certainty and then anxiety in it reaching its destination. There are quite a few cars at the sides of the road. Most of them have been left in the snow, because of the snow, for the time being, and some have stopped to take timeless photos of snow covered mountains, snow-hidden frozen lochs and snow laden trees. The photographs taken from this car will be dated photographs because it doesn't stop. The interior is a constant, and the landscape is temporary (requiring a camera), and the car will be memorialised through smudged windscreen wipers, head-rest corners, a-, b-, c-, d-pillars, rear-window heating-strip and the quarter-light.

In travel photographs from childhood, there would often be one catching Dad's head in the rear-view mirror, with steel-rimmed spectacles doubled and superimposed on forehead through some double reflection.

As the best way to make a timeless picture is to remove cars, people and buildings, the easiest way to date a photo is by looking for these things. Glasgow arrived when the mountains ran out.

Sundae Sundays

2011-10-05T15:35:00.000-07:00

A collaboration with the incredible Louise Lockhart to make a guide to Glasgow's ice cream parlours.

Delicious Cake

2009-06-11T07:37:00.000-07:00

Other People's Gardens

2009-06-11T07:36:00.000-07:00

An art school project to draw secret places that may or may not have encouraged a little breaking and entering. Well, entering, at any rate.

Daisies Film Poster

2009-06-11T07:34:00.000-07:00

My favourite film.

Hip Hop Alphabet

2009-06-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

A birthday present for a friend's zine.

Berlin Travel Diary

2009-06-11T07:29:00.002-07:00

Fungus

2009-06-11T07:29:00.001-07:00

A typography project

Numbers In The Dark Rules

2009-06-11T02:57:00.000-07:00

weapon of mass devotion

2009-06-11T02:52:00.000-07:00

About

2007-10-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

Rosemary Ferrier is a freelance illustrator based in Glasgow, with a visual communications degree from the Glasgow School of Art. Available for drawing, designing, drafting, doodling, describing, delineating, depicting, devising, diagrams, dinner, and danger.