Craig & Karl’s inflatable Cosmos welcomes Melbourne’s commuters with smiles, shapes and surprises
A transatlantic duo, Craig Redman and Karl Maier of Craig & Karl have been professionally working at great distances for quite some years now. Now, their latest project, Cosmos, takes them down under. Destination: Melbourne Central.
Marking a return to their roots, Craig and Karl first met in Australia, where they both went to university before Craig moved to New York and Karl to London – where they have collaborated from since. “During this process, we realised we didn’t need to live in the same city or country to work together,” Craig tells us, “everything could be done via messenger apps and file sharing,” laying the practical groundwork for the artists and designers’ well-oiled collective process. For each project, Craig says they start with a conversation and “verbal exchange of ideas” before developing sketches from those ideas, working primarily across design, illustration, and installation.
Returning to Australia for the 2024 winter season, Craig & Karl were approached by Dot Dot Dash agency to create an installation for Melbourne Central Station during its holiday period. “We wanted it to read more festive than super Christmas-y,” Karl explains, “and felt we could encapsulate this through colour and mood,” exploring playful ways in which to transform the station’s remarkable space. “Our existing visual language provided the starting point,” he says. “We wanted to create a fun and celebratory atmosphere that captures the season’s spirit in a way that surprises and delights visitors,” leading them to take full advantage of the station’s height.
“We’re especially interested in creating environments that shift visitors’ moods,” Craig says, “by ‘entering’ one of our spaces, we hope to transport people out of their everyday environments,” forging a creative, uplifting space for positivity, play and optimism. “Working in public spaces is great because we get to meet an audience where they are and to inject art into everyday life,” Craigs adds. “There’s some magic in it,” – something particularly found across Craig & Karl’s super large-scale installations. “They provide that sense of escape and wonder,” Craig says, “it can have a heightened effect through an element of surprise, encountering people in an unexpected context.”
The context itself, namely Melbourne Central’s indoor atrium, led to a number of creative and logistical challenges for Craig & Karl, notably, how best to effectively use the confines of the space. “Because the space is so vast, it was important to fill as much of it as possible,” Craig says, concerned about losing the installation if too little space was used. “Once we’d figured out the spatial volume, we started the design process,” he continues, creating shapes, colours, and patterns that nicely complemented one another and the theme in hand. “A lot of the shapes in Cosmos are abstracted with some turned figurative by adding facial expressions,” Craig says, injecting a sense of pleasant surprise depending on the angle at which one sees the shapes. “For example, if you’re standing under the installation, you might see a face you didn’t catch from the side,” he adds, “that creates many points of interest for visitors to discover as they move through the space.”
Looking back at the project and how it fits into the duo’s wider practice, Karl stresses the most critical element of both Cosmos and their work as a whole: the idea. “It doesn’t matter if the final outcome is an installation, an illustration or an animation,” Karl says, “we don’t see different mediums or scales as different kinds of projects,” treating both a three-storey installation and a poster in the same manner. “The kind of questions we might ask ourselves when we approach any project (big or small),” he asks, “is ‘what is the tone we want to set?’, ‘what will the viewer’s immediate response be to this vs their long-term impression?’,” shaping a foundation of necessary creative interrogation. “These questions are really important in our practice,” Karl ends, “and dictate everything we do.”