Unveiled at the recent opening of the school’s degree show, the Big Thank You Project is the result of the Lancashire-raised artist penning a heartfelt letter of appreciation to the manufacturer and provider of every product and service she used in her day-to-day life, as part of the ultimate portrait of the artist as a young consumer.
The project, says Lowther, is a sideways response to the credit crunch: “So much of what we hear about the economic situation is so impersonal — it’s just sets of numbers about redundancies,” she says. “This is meant to be a reminder that companies are made up of hundreds of real people. It’s real people who open my letters and pass them on to their managing directors.”
Inspired by a polar bear hot-water bottle she received from her sister as a Christmas present, the 23-year-old began considering the systems that made the objects she consumed. Since then, she has written more than 200 letters of acknowledgement and received 100 back thanking her for her thanks. With a strict rule that she could write only to the producers of items that she genuinely consumed and appreciated, Lowther dashed off disarming, even somewhat gauche notes to the makers of camera film, crisps, baking aids, desserts and Apple Macs.
Recipients ranged from Jamie Oliver, the supplier of an impressive cheesecake recipe in his Ministry of Food cookbook, to the Queen, encountered by chance two years ago as Lowther and friends were walking near Balmoral. “The most interesting aspect of the project,” she says, “is researching into companies for their addresses and discovering that brands belong to corporations you’d never associate them with. GlaxoSmithKline owns Ribena. You assume that products have unique personalities and are tailored for you as a consumer, but behind it all they’re being churned out by monolithic corporations.”
The finished work is a studio wall covered from top to bottom with 296 framed A4 letters. There’s a supplementary stall selling the complimentary baubles that companies sent her, including several bags of Tate & Lyle sugar (available at £35 each), a £2 voucher from Marmite provided to let Lowther sample further products from the range (now £4.50) and a tea towel from Strathclyde Partnership for Transport.
To underline their transformed status, Lowther will autograph the items for an extra £5: “I do think of the freebies as artworks too,” she says. “I wouldn’t have them if I hadn’t embarked on the project.”
You get the sense from the letters that working in the public relation departments of major corporations is a thankless existence, a point made when Lowther receives correspondence from Clarins about their moisturiser: “As you can imagine, most people are quick to query and slow to praise.”
Lowther’s gratitude even extends to less popular areas of the economy. “Banks are often overlooked,” she wrote to Royal Bank of Scotland in February, “as people use the service and take it for granted, often forgetting the organisation and the people behind it all.”
There’s also an awareness that not all product-consumer relationships are beneficial, as when she writes to the makers of Marlboro cigarettes: “I really am unsure where I would be without the product. I would also like to apologise for not buying the product in the future when I give up smoking.”
The project did not end with the degree show. Lowther continues to write the letters on a daily basis whenever sufficiently moved by a product’s virtues. She has one crucial thank-you missive left to write — to her father, for putting up more than £1,000 to frame the letters.
She also wrote back to companies following their replies, asking them to donate £5.70 towards the cost of their correspondence appearing in the Big Thank You Project. So far she has received just £37. Clearly the art of generosity only goes so far.
Harriet Lowther’s work appears in the Glasgow Collective show at Shoreditch Town Hall, London, from July 10-17
For full article please go to: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article6543201.ece