Harriet Richardson

0:00 [Applause] hello everyone it's nice to see you um so where do I begin at the beginning of this year I bumped into an ex-boyfriend at tub stop and we did that thing where you know you're sort of trying to make your life sound better than it is and um he said how are you and I lied and said good um and then I told him that I was doing a talk at nice of Tuesdays and he was so impressed like it just it went so well and I I got home that evening and thought you know what I need to email Nic of Tuesdays and ask if I can do a talk so thank you for having me I did invite him I don't know if he's here so um yes this is my talk live laugh

0:55 love Revenge um my name is Harriet Richardson it's to meet you um I've lived in London for about 10 years now but I'm from Manchester originally and I study graphic design at the University of Central Lancashire shout out um I am both a freelance graphic designer and a performance artist and I um use humor pretty much throughout a lot of a lot of my work um I love performance art it's something that I only recently discovered to be honest in the last year or so and I'm obsessed with it and today I would like to talk to you about my favorite uh form of performance art and arguably My love language which is

1:35 Revenge so um so I yes I moved to London and I first worked at Turner Duckworth and then about a year on uh started working at pentagram pentagram is the world's largest independent design agency and I um I worked there for four and a half years and I've put together just a short film of like an overview of all the work I I did in that time so um please enjoy do you want to see it again there you go thank you um yeah I'm not here today to talk to you about pentagram or graphic design I'm sure you'll be sad to hear um but what I would like to talk about is an event that happened about two years into my time at pentagram which is when I became aware of climate change this is climate change um I saw this graph in

2:31 around 2019 and that was when I really started sort of absorbing what you know the climate crisis was um listen I'm no scientist but um yeah I think that's not looking great I don't know what it means but um yeah it doesn't look good so at the time I was reading a book by the scientist David Wallace Wells um it's called uninhabitable Earth and I highly recommend reading it if you want to learn about that kind of stuff but make sure you're in a good mental place um so there was this quote that really stuck with me and it ends with no humans have walked the Earth in a climate as warm as this one which is just so crazy and I remember hearing that for the first time and I couldn't you know it it took a

3:14 little while to process so I'm absorbing all this information I'm in pentagram in June and it's like una a conditioned you know my pentagram girlies will know it's very hot and I'm starting to panic and I think well what can I do about it what can what can Harriet do so I text my P pentagram partner John uh we'll call him John because that's his name and I texted him and said uh next Thursday there's this uh climate crisis protest and I think it's in pentagrams best interest for us to go so he text me back and he said uh you have to take it as holiday which you know it's fair enough he's a business guy like I totally get it um but I'm the kind of girl who takes like all her holiday in

3:59 the first month of of um you know the year so that wasn't an option for me and I thought what I'm going to do is I'm going to shmoo him in person because I hope you can tell I'm quite the schmoo when I want to be um so I go and see him in pentagram and I go through his little office and I say John um you know I tell him all the facts and I try and appeal to the fact he has children you know I'm really laying it on and he says Harriet I won't do his voice he says Harriet once you allow one of these things every everyone will want to do it then what and I'm like John you're a genius allow everyone to do it so I'm very you know I I thank him

4:41 for his time I say I totally understand and then the next thing I do is I go back to my little desk and I spend the afternoon um emailing every single person at pentagram other than John it took me about two hours to type out all the emails and I it B I won't read it cuz it's too cringe um but it it basically says we should all go to this climate protest you know I can't wait to see you all there I've signed it your favorite designer Harriet I was more I was worse back then so um yeah I emailed everyone and then the day rolled around and I you know had this image of like 90 people gathered in the foyer and we're all ready to storm

5:20 out anyway so it's about an hour before we're leaving and I think well we can't go empty-handed what we're designers that would be you know embarrassing so me and my friend Fatima sat at my desk and I swear to God in about 20 minutes put these signs together some of them are rubbish some of them are funny some of them are good it was more about the fact that we just needed something to take with us you know it' be embarrassing if we didn't um so we printed them on the pentagram printer and um went downstairs to meet this group of 90 people that we would be storming out with so there was six of us this is Marina and and uh some of her

6:00 fabulous team and yeah there were six of us a really important detail of this story is that my partner and boss John uh was in a meeting so I you know met these guys in the foyer and just to explain my sign um I'm sure everyone knows this by now but in 2019 it wasn't very common knowledge that um Leonardo DiCaprio has never dated anyone over the age of 25 so my poster was about um you know the fact that we should save the future for his girlfriend friends who were young um and we we went to the protest it was incredible if you've never been to a protest I highly encourage you to go the um you know the energy the design

6:42 all of it was just insane loved it um no complaints and we were there for about an hour and a half I would say um we got Paparazzi this sign gets slightly less funny in a second um so we're there getting pap at seed it's all going well and when we get back to the office John still in the meeting so I'm like oh my God I I got away with it like I did something I believed in incredible like I was so happy and then the next day I'm sitting there doing my work and I get an email from one of my colleagues and he says Harriet is that you this article which is titled the incredible women who missed work and school and I'm like oh I'm I'm like yeah

7:29 that does look a bit like me weird um and I said you know what wouldn't it be fun if we just didn't tell anyone about this so so um you know I was panicking a bit my my friend Fatima was sat next to me and she was like Harriet John doesn't read refiner 29 he's you know he's like a guardian guy he's not he's not seeing any of this stuff so the evening of that day um this happened um this was before things went viral so it was like quite shocking I was having a panic attack every hour um I got like 5,000 followers overnight and it was getting you know it was gaining momentum and I just was not ready for that at all and my friend calls me uh and she's like listen I know you're going to be panicking but just

8:13 remember John doesn't know how to use Twitter he's not on he's not on Tik Tok you know she's really like you know calming me down and I'm like yeah yeah yeah you're right she says just remember he's the kind of guy that only reads the guardian fabulous so I mean I can't stress this enough I thought my life was over um what was I like 24 at the time and I I was so prepared to get fired you know so I go into the office the next day knowing John 100% has seen this and I I go to my desk and I'm working away and I see him come up the stairs and then he goes into his little office and then I get an email from him and I'm like that's my

8:53 p60 he's just sent I'm I'm gone and the email just says nice poster um so well not only did I not get fired from pentagram for doing that um I also started making my own work and you know that event really spurred me on to create more sort of placard style prints they were you know they started out as po political but then evolved into just self-expression um it also secured my first ever freelance client which was Extinction Rebellion which opened so many doors for me and that's eventually led to me you know being able to choose clients that I want to work with now so that's how I make a living by the way um but above all of that uh the protest

9:42 made me recognize the power of Performing and the power of amassing and directing attention which I love um for an expression of Truth so I'm sure you're all going to be really surprised to hear that my exit from the world of full full-time corporate design was not a quiet one um after four and a half years at pentagram I accepted a job as creative director of a well-known design agency because I thought that's what you do after pentagram and I didn't even have to wait long enough to find out that it wasn't for me because I was unfortunate enough to work with a bully um I did what I could to report The Bullying but in the end as it was

10:21 the director who was the culprate um my word wasn't you know enough for the company to take action but on the night before I quit my job I took home the work scanner and a bottle of wine and did some warm-up stretches and eventually created this project which is called scandalous the following pages are a fot you the art of saying [ __ ] you to the corporate world through the medium of as press to office scanner is a well trodden path but exploring that path in the middle of a breakdown was an absolute pleasure um I had so many emotions that I had to bottle up you know professionally for so long um I was heartbroken at the realization I was heartbroken at the

11:09 realization that I'd once again been let down by sexism misogyny the power imbalance you know in an industry that I used to really love and in that moment I can't tell you how important expression of self became especially when breaking up with the career that I thought I'd be in forever it was so freeing they're some nice titties um they're not a scale that is I'm just going to leave that there for a second um when I was crying and pressing my butthole against uh the glass of a scanner um with a bottle of echo Falls I could never have imagined that I would be sharing this with this intimate group of 700 people um I start with these pictures

12:04 actually for about a year and U when I was ready and I processed everything I I compiled it into this book which I'm really proud of um oh you can see that good this feels like revenge on the whole world of graphic design this is actually just a single hair that I printed on the back um and yeah it's an Ode to all the Stray hairs that Grace portfolios um so that's scandalous oh oh [ __ ] what does that say you are the 10,000th visitor of harri Richardson's website harri richardson.com that must be where you can buy this book amazing wait let me just sorry let me just try and get rid of that popup oh

12:51 [ __ ] I'm so sorry I'm so sorry does any does anyone know how to get rid of these stupid oh oh my God sorry this is why I don't use keynote okay the learning from that project that I would like to show with you all is if you don't have anything nice to say there's likely something wrong and you should make a project about it um speaking of not having anything nice to say um in January of this year I was seeing a guy who ghosted me a week before Valentine's Day there's the text um that's yeah the text I got left on red on excellent and if I'm being completely honest uh the idea for this project came around while I was just trying to find

13:38 an excuse to post hot pictures of myself online CU why not um my project 100 dates was effectively me trying to busy myself from the moment I woke up on Valentine's Day until the moment I went to bed um super normal super healthy thing to do so I put an open call out on Instagram um and within a day or two I had 100 dates lined up so if that's not a flex and I had a 100 reserves okay I'm going to stop flexing um that'll show him bloody L recently rejected artist Harry Richardson set to date 100 people on Valentine's Day they didn't have to write that um yeah the call out started getting media attention it really helped you know to to make the project possible

14:30 so the night before um the 100 dates happened I posted this sort of Marina Abramovich style like instructions um and it was effectively just asking people to treat the dates as dates because that's exactly what it was um I wanted it to be genuine and you know for people to not refer to the performance that kind of thing um and then it happened my first date was at 8:00 a.m. and it went all the way through until 2:00 a.m. the next day it was an 8 18-hour non-stop durational dating piece um I got Pro progressively drunker I ended up in bed as most good dates do um and I streamed yeah most of it and um I was just absolutely overwhelmed and Blown Away with um how it was received

15:17 by both the participants and also the viewers people did things like they read poems they performed songs they cooked for me and had like you know full Meals Ready on webcam um shared like very deeply personal things laughed cried all of it and um I think one of the things that I loved about it the most is that it was just happening then you know it could be documented and we could remember it but just like a normal date you know you can't recreate it so um yeah I really enjoyed it the other thing I had was a file drop where people submitted documentation of of the piece and um I like this one cuz you can tell I don't know how to make an appol

15:57 sprits this one great it's just someone sent me a picture of salad while I was having a Wii so um yeah and I was really grateful that the performance was covered by some of the big boys um this is one of vice's last articles so sorry for killing Vice I guess sorry about it um it was very strange having a man from The Guardian shooting me in bed uh as I pretended to be on my laptop very strange obviously I had to make merch I'm still a struggling artist um I sold all 100 of the I dated Harriet hats and only three of the lousy ones so yeah it'd be it'd be wild if you had a discount code for my website um yeah another crazy thing that happened

16:45 was I was invited to pentagram New York by Michael Beirut to talk about 100 dates um I'm going to be really honest with you I used to follow and unfollow Michael beut so he would notice me on Instagram and I think it's I think it's a really beautiful thing that he only noticed me after Pentagram When I was doing something that I loved um it was painful for the four and a half years that he didn't follow me back but I'm over it now clearly and do you know what happened the [ __ ] guy text me back didn't he text me back a day after Valentine's Day and said oh I saw your thing on Vice yeah I bet you did and did I reply no of course I

17:27 didn't I've got bigger fish to fry oh I'm so sorry about that stupid popups um I mean the learning for me from that project is that your creativity is yours it's there to serve you um this project could easily have been a campaign for hinge or Tinder or even Zoom but it wasn't it was it was for me and it was for the people involved um and yes I still do client work and you know that's part of my you know the way I sustain my life but separate ating design and client work and then art as my passion has basically been the making of me and I'm so grateful that I get to do it oh no she's going to talk about it um so I'm going to leave you on this one Speaking of

18:14 paid jobs um I was approached by um well I received an email two months ago from the very respected design agency kastle's chromer asking if I'd be interested to do a piece of work to be exhibited at the London design Festival in their currency of the future exhibition for the bank of England stay with me on this one um so this is the brief this is a page from the actual brief as you can see it's a brief um it says somewhere in there that we'd like you to produce a piece of work which represents what you think the currency of the future should be interesting interesting brief these are the brief constraints please note as visual people that this is double the length of that so we're

19:02 all in agreement this is a brief with constraints it's an artist commission God I feel like I'm on Judge rinder sorry evidence um yeah so got the brief um during my briefing call with them I forgot to ask about the payment for the project you know for my skills for my time for my work etc um so I emailed them and just said you know I presume you're going to be paying the artists for this right I mean you know what happens don't you obviously um yeah they email me back and I doubt this will be a jump scare to anyone in here but they said unfortunately no there is no artist fee involved which is absolutely mental um

19:45 and then they said let us know if you think this project is still interesting to you um let me think about that an unpaid commission for the bank of England about the currency of the future dude listen I know an opportunity when I see one that's crazy of course I said yes so I set aside one unpaid hour of my time and completed the work in that hour and here it [Laughter] is it says I was commissioned to do this artwork and all I got paid was this lousy exposure I I love that uh slogan um to this day I have no idea what possessed the them to put this in the show it was actually in the Bank of England museum for a week

20:38 brilliant um I think what's so perfect about this project are the details I was told the main payment was going to be exposure and yet my piece didn't appear anywhere on their social channels or anywhere on the bank of England or in any advertisements but where it did appear was in Creative review it was actually the only piece of the 20 submissions that they went into detail on which I'm sure kastle's Kramer absolutely loved um and then the cherry on top was when kessle Kramer decided to sell the prints on their website uh which wasn't initially something they were going to do but they decided you know it might be a way to pay artists and mine was the

21:19 only one they accidentally listed for 2,800 there she is oh as if 20% off's going to help that's so annoying as part of the exposure performance I documented all of this posted it online as you should and the feedback was overwhelming if you want to have a good laugh go and read the comments on this post because it's devastating that it's such a common thing but it's also um really really funny what some of you had to say um yeah excellent for me the last few years have been a lesson in knowing the difference between being good at something and doing what feels right I'm good at design I'm good at advertising and let me tell you I can fulfill a brief but

22:09 what am I adding to the Noise by doing so um I've worked for years and years and years for [ __ ] clients you know on [ __ ] briefs doing not what I wanted to do um and I recognize the privilege that I've worked towards in having a choice now so even if your aim is just to one day try and you know use your creativity for good I think it's all we can ask um balancing ethical client work and uh creating the art that I love I think is the Real Performance and that's what performance art is to me thank you.