Keeping up a tradition that sees them collaborate with Irish artists to produce limited edition bottles of their delicious distillation, Jameson have teamed up with street artist James Earley, who casual observers may be most familiar with from his spectacular transformation of Blooms Hotel into a technicolor tribute to Joyce’s Ulysses, to produce the ‘Connections’ edition. Ahead of its launch to celebrate this year’s St. Patrick’s Day festivities, we chatted with James to find out more about what went into the project and his own interpretation of how to represent his home city on the iconic Jameson bottle.
Tell me about what are the elements that you brought to the limited edition bottle design and what did you want to integrate into it.
James Earley: Basically the project is done to promote St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin, and to mainly focus on Dublin itself. The big questions were, “What does Dublin mean to you?” and “What does St. Patrick’s Day mean to you?” With those two things I was thinking that what Dublin really means to me, it’s the people and it’s the social connections the people have with one another that makes Dublin unique and special. And, likewise, when people come to Dublin and leave, the main thing they usually remember is the experiences that they have with Dubliners and the connections they have with them. So when you look at the bottle, there’s kind of a honeycomb effect of the line and dots connect to each other through these lines and they have a visual representation of the connection between people.
Furthering on that, it’s the idea of linking from one side of the city to another, and I thought the perfect way to represent that was through the bridges of Dublin. They are obviously a big part of Dublin, and they are well known by Dubliners and by visitors alike. They often show a chronological history of architecture in Dublin, as there’s usually a new bridge built every three or four years, so they feature heavily on the bottle. Things like the hippocampi, or mer-horses, are taken from Grattan Bridge, and other features are say the Ha’penny Bridge, that’s the main lantern is in the very centre of the main label of the bottle, and then a series of other bridges are in the background of the label. At the very top, the neck label features O’Connell Street Bridge, the keystones on either side of the main arch, one is of Neptune, the god of the sea, and on the other side there’s a lady and that’s Anna Liffey and they’re both illustrated on the bottle.
Jameson were pretty open about what I could or couldn’t do. There were some things set in stone, while some elements are always present on all bottles they put out: the logo, the signature, the ship as well. But I worked over those. With that said, I’m putting my own stamp on them and integrating them with my own style.
When they approached you to start was the brief really as open as ‘What does Dublin mean to you’?
JE: Yes, it was. It was just to capture Dublin and it will be launched for St. Patrick’s Day, so obviously you’re celebrating Dublin through some artistic manor. So it was a pretty open brief, and when you think of Dublin right away it’s hard not to have so many clichés go through your head, and in living in Dublin for so many years, the hardest part was probably looking at it through fresh eyes, while pulling in your own personal style as well. Actually, designing the label was a bit smaller than what we usually work on, but that was never an issue at all. Really, I just tried to look at Dublin through a unique manner and stop any clichés from falling to mind.
How long does a project like this take to develop? If it’s coming out on St. Patrick’s Day, how long ago did you start?
JE: About two, three years ago.
Really, that long?
JE: Yeah I’ve been keeping quiet about this for quite some time.
Is this a fairly unusual project for you to work on then?
JE: This scale? I do a lot of graphic design work, that’s what I did in college, but the majority of my work is spray painting. It wasn’t foreign territory, but working on a design that has been produced five hundred thousand times, I’ve never anything to that magnitude. Really, a superb opportunity and really good publicity.
Was that the main draw to it? The scale of the brand?
JE: The publicity would be amazing, but the main draw was Jameson’s honesty in their brand story, so it’s not made up, they genuinely have managed to create this brand over time and their product is a really solid one. I love Jameson! I love drinking it, and I love being involved in their brand because I believe in it. I think I went in to the facilities, I was given a tour, and it’s all really genuine. They’ve worked with artists over the years, even back when the company was first starting out, they worked with a stained glass artist, Harry Clark and he did some illustrations for them as well. The link with artists has been going on for a long time. They realise the importance of linking in with creatives.
In a general sense, Irish design seems to be in a really good place on the back of that campaign year last year. I’m just wondering how much graphic design you did still and how connected you feel that as an urban artist?
JE: I feel more involved in art than graphic design, to be honest. Painting large scale work, my personal work or working with companies. I do a lot of that. I do a lot of art curations as well, and I trade all the art for the Dean Hotel, around 240 pieces went in there. I do a lot of work with private collectors.
Do you have any other big projects coming up? Are you going to paint any more buildings in Dublin after crazy books or something like that?
JE: [laughs] I guess there’s a lot of projects coming up. I’m painting a large mural for Jameson coming up and that’s gonna be on the Cobblestone Pub. That’s gonna be painted at the end of February, and I’m just after finishing that I have a project with the Gibson Hotel, I did an artist in residence time with them I have a large exterior piece with them. Also I’m supplying them with four large silkscreen prints for their permanent collection. I am working a lot for a project Iverna.ie too, which is representing a couple of different artists and it’s all limited edition work. I’ve got a lot in store for that this year.
Is this just like a record label, where you have a whole stable of people or is it just a general Irish art collection?
JE: It’s people that I’ve worked with in the past and others I admire that I feel that their work is a very high standard. Everybody on that site is someone who’s been very progressive in their fields. Whether its street artists, photographers, or graphic artists, and they’re all very talented. They’re all people I’ve watched grown over the years.
You can find out more about James’ work, check out:
