Parish of St Helier
A legacy worth fighting for: Honouring World War 1 in St Helier
Project overview
To design historical dialogues that honour Jersey’s World War 1 heroes, both on island and on the front line, was an incredibly poignant and meaningful brief for the studio and one we are now very proud to see the results of. This brief was presented to us by the award-winning and competition-winning architect Siobhann Macleod from Axis Mason. Having won the competition tender with her structure design, she engaged Potting Shed to work with her on the execution of the typography for said structures.
Project details
At the initial briefing, it was obvious we needed a worthy and pertinent solution, rich in research and with thoughtful creative, architected at an incredibly large format. What’s more, the responsibility is that your work will live far beyond our time on this planet and generations far beyond that.
We were provided with a vast amount of content and dialogue that had already been beautifully researched by an incredible local historian. We began by selecting content that truly enabled us to give voice to the structures. At times you well up, at times you laugh, and at times you feel as though you were there. However, every voice in all the words we chose was larger than any design or typography we produced. When we found ourselves at this junction, we had to manage our creative subjectivity with the true honouring of this memorial. We needed to let the voices be heard and remembered and design from a meaningful origin.
There are 2 structures, the stone and the Core 10 metal. Put simply, the stone contains the voices from Jersey during the war, predominantly women. The metal structure represents the men at war on the front line. There is a physical divide between the structures, representing that actual divide in time and space. However, the words connect the structures, at times functionally and at times emotionally. The narrative on the stone comes in the form of news articles, letters or poems, all with an energy that we tried to help live far beyond its history and time. The metal structure is simply a roll call of all the heroes that represented our island, lest we forget.
The memorial is ever-changing; the Core 10 metal will age over time. Intentionally, the stone piece is lit from below, as if buoyant with a sense of hope; in contrast, the metal structure is lit from within, perpetuating the lives that shine on in memory forever.
We could talk at length about the typefaces and design, but we hope the work speaks for itself; we simply wanted the voices to be heard and transcend any subjectivity of our design.
“Mémouaithe sans fîn - honneur êtèrnel.”
