And now for someone completely different
I did send a tweet saying ‘hullo I am tweeting with my nose’ but due to auto-correct it came out as ‘hello I am meeting with my nose’.”
He has also designed and had manufactured a pair of beautiful shoes with a built-in GPS which will take the wearer to any destination, no matter where he or she is in the world.
“Northamptonshire is famous for shoemaking, so I decided to make a pair of shoes there that can navigate you anywhere. Remember how Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz could click her shoes together to go home?” After uploading your required destination to the shoes via custom-made mapping software and a USB cable, the GPS, which is embedded in the heel, is activated by a heel click.”
Although his aesthetic might sound a bit impractical, after look- ing at his bug-like driverless car with stained-glass windows like a small chapel, one thinks, well, why not? So many cars have darkened windows, why not colour them up?
But most wonderful are his sketches (look at his book Variations on Normal), all practical and possible, a tear-off tablecloth that works on a roller, like a kitchen towel, and is positioned under the table; a sick bag attached to a false beard for a man being sick on a bus; a wig with built-in camera and mic as memory backup. Some are useful inventions, like the sliding handles on a stepladder and a dual-use coffin/desk.
Wilcox uses technology but says he is not a techno person and likes sketching his ideas. “The thing about sketching is that you can doodle or think a thought and it can make you think of something else and if you make a mistake you can rub it out.”
Here are some reasons I loved meeting Dominic Wilcox. He is possibly mad. He doesn’t care what people think about him. He is a conceptual designer (a category yet to be properly defined). He is goodlooking but seems unaware of it. He is polite and humble, and he does hard-to-do jobs with little pay, all with passion, some just for the love of the concept. He has beautiful hands. He went to technical colleges (a better education than most universities), but most of all he is not wearing one trendy, labelled item of clothing and he did not mention the word Africa once. In fact, he appeared not to know he was in it. Also, he lives in unfashionable (at least at the time of writing, London changes in seconds) Hackney.
But most of all I loved him because it is people like Wilcox who underpin the whole of the British art and technological world — boys from working-class backgrounds with brilliant and slightly mad ideas. Not in a hundred years, would they think of discussing their advancement prospects or holiday benefits with a boss, or sting you into a coma with personal publicity. LS • Variations on Normal by Dominic Wilcox (Square Peg).