Etcetera was an exhibition by SPIN, held in London in July 2022. 

Art and design have long been intertwined — but if it was ever a simple task to distinguish one from the other, then the border today is no longer so clear-cut. At a time when art and design increasingly share the same formal, material and economic environments, for us they are not two separate disciplines, but the evolving outcome of our creative process. 

Etcetera presented some of our recent creations, collecting the experiments, offshoots, and outgrowths of our work beyond commissioned design projects. Spanning painting, print, sculpture, photography, video and animation, the exhibition brings together and blurred the boundaries of analogue and digital media, while finding inspiration in figures from Ovid to Gustav Metzger. 

Our native field of graphic design, we often hear, is a matter of ‘visual communication’. But what happens when this paradigm is stretched and expanded — when the visual is interested not only in communicating but also in scrambling, glitching, resignifying? Occupying the areas between legibility and abstraction, irony and sincerity, communication and withdrawal, Etcetera offered one set of answers. 

Metamorphosis is inspired by Ovid, Kafka, nature and transformation. It takes form as a series of typographic artworks exploring letterforms, language, and the crossover between the digital and the analogue. 

HI is a series of staged encounters with a word we use without thinking. Transplanted into different visual contexts, each HI projects a different, perhaps unexpected, mood or tone. In a world defined by mass communications, both real and virtual, it would be naïve to think a word can only mean one thing. Especially a word we use all the time. 

Symmetrika explores the space between representation and abstraction, using a single shape that works simultaneously as a modular form for patterns and as an experimental typographic unit that drifts in and out of legibility.

Made by balloon animals filled with ink, Pop and Blow look playfully at what happens when art makes itself. In the 1960s, the artist Gustav Metzger coined the term ‘auto-destructive art’; a tongue-in-cheek reinterpretation of Metzger’s concept, these 'auto-constructive' works are the results of deliberately relinquishing artistic control. 

Everything at once (almost). Motion is an essential component of any undertaking these days and this piece connects our projects HI, Symmetrika, Metamorphosis, Rotation and more — pulling together a selection of the disparate ideas and images they explore in a continuous, dynamic, borderline chaotic stream, and delivering sensory overload.