NAEMI
NAEMI
The late artist Naemi Eriksson portrayed her life in paintings of flowers of all sorts. She called them “evil” and “good” flowers. Instead of doing evil actions, she painted evil flowers. It was a way to cope with life as a busy nurse and mother on the Swedish island Gotland. In 2020, she would have turned 100 years. To celebrate that, Museum of Gotland collected her most interesting pieces to display in the summer of 2020. I rebranded the exhibition and gave Naemi her own typeface.
Today my family owns Naemi’s old house, where the walls are covered in flowers and the doors have huge faces painted on top of them. We eat among her flowers and sleep behind her portraits, and it is a privilege to experience her art in the way she did. She spoke about wanting to escape reality sometimes and I believe that’s why she tried to fill her house with these paintings.
Naemi’s surrealistic paintings spreads from canvas to wall to door. And they are often based on the nature of her garden. I realised that just like she goes beyond the frame, my typeface should too. So the core of this font is the sense that it goes beyond what you can see. Some angles are cut off to visualise that. But you can’t forget her incredible plants and flowers, so I based the curves off of a stem-like shape. I think of the bold and sharp segments as the dark side of her paintings and they complement the soft and delicate curves of the characters.
In the branding of the exhibition I wanted to keep the same theme, but still be able to show Naemi’s actual works of art. I used a zoomed in window of her paintings to get the same idea of them continuing beyond the frame. The primary color is orange because of all the poppies in her garden that she loved to paint. The secondary color is a blueweed’s blue for a nice contrast.
A sketch of how I would curate the exhibition at the museum.
In July 2022, I took a course in typography and branding, at School of Visual Arts NYC. The assignment for the month was to create a custom typeface for a specific brand. I dedicated my typeface to Naemi.