Shrinky Dink Time Travel

Art/ music collective First Fold Records have, over the past couple of years, encouraged me to be creative and the results of my endeavours have, thus far, been supported without question. They offer up projects that can take either audio or visual form and are very hard to turn down. I find it difficult to say ‘no’ as, for one thing, First Fold Records are an incredibly decent and amiable bunch of people and also the projects are so challenging and enticing. ‘Premier Pli’ is the record labels most recent venture. It is an occasional publication where artists/ musicians/ writers are invited to contribute pages of images or text and the work is linked by a theme selected by guest editors. This ‘commission’ has taken me in creative directions that I would never have travelled on my own and, add that to my wife’s invaluable critique and encouragement, I have pushed myself like never before to produce some of my most successful visual material to date.

For issue two of ‘Premier Pli’ the theme has been set by guest editors Pierre and Karlheinz. It is simply ‘Nostalgia’. The brief is to fill four pages with visuals and to contribute one audio track (for the cover CD) keeping the nostalgia theme in mind. The theme acts as a guiding light through the foggy seas of the creative process.

It has been a strange thing for me to think about nostalgia, the things that I am nostalgic about and the things that trigger these bizarre feelings. Nostalgia comes in many forms. From an idealised yearning for the past to being seen as a sickness often grouped in with melancholy in the early modern period (around 1500AD – 1800AD according to Wikipedia) nostalgia has many faces and therefore has numerous creative directions and possibilities. This can be overwhelming and yet incredibly seductive from a creative point of view.

Talking of nostalgia triggers, I read the words ‘Shrinky Dinks’ today. I probably hadn’t thought about this peculiar home craft item for maybe thirty years but those two mystical words opened a wormhole to my past and brought a whole load of happy memories back to me in an instant. This plastic material that you could draw on with colouring pencils and whack in your oven and cook triggering a magical transformation used to fill me with wonder. I am amazed to discover that this material is still available. I am overjoyed and inspired that this material is still available. Maybe this is a just a little hint that magic really does exist. By believing and instilling a certain supernatural quality to the things that, via nostalgia, we have put on pedestals we can journey back to happy times, to other worlds long thought dead or forgotten. We can travel to a time and place where, as a child, we used to actually make things by physically interacting with them. To the artists and crafts people who make stuff with their hands - stitch, stick, cut, sew, fold, paint, craft, sculpt - I salute you. I enjoyed my trip in the Shrinky Dink Time Machine. Thoroughly.