23 Stories from 150 years of Cricket
Fisher Classics was commissioned by the Australian Sports Museum to create 23 artworks for the Test Tales — one story for every nation to have played Test cricket, across men’s and women’s cricket.
The exhibition runs for 150 days; from October 12 to March 17 - the first day of the Sesquicentenary test between England and Australia at the MCG.
The brief was simple but the subject was broad and complex; to make the 23 unique stories from a century and a half of cricket feel like a cohesive exhibition.
Colour became an immediate national identifier and graphic shapes, typography and texture designated the time of each story.
Hand-made collage elements
Almost everything about cricket is hand-crafted; the balls, the bats, pitches and skill. Hand cutting basic shapes from paper became the basic elements of the artworks to help unify the exhibition and surround the players depicted.
The collage language offered enough flexibility to move from the Victorian through the twentieth century and into the modern game without turning every artwork into a completely different design.
Process
The time bound nature of the brief meant creating 23 print-ready artworks in 46 calendar days. An agile workflow was adopted to make sure that production could keep moving while we waited for archival images to be sourced.
A reverse brief and style guide was approved by the Museum and sketches were added to a shared document to keep the direction transparent.
