Attitude and Jaguar’s The Creators season two: three makers on originality, instinct and why copying isn’t an option

The Creators is a film series from Attitude and Jaguar putting makers in front of the camera to ask what genuine originality demands of a person. Season two features glass artist Emma Goring, multidisciplinary artist Annabel MacIver and Jaguar lead materiality designer Axel Goulée.

Jaguar founder Sir William Lyons had a principle he applied to everything the company made: “A Jaguar should be a copy of nothing.” It’s easier to say than to live by, however – and all three creators know it.

Goring works in hot glass from her studio in Nottinghamshire, in a craft she knows has no new tricks left. “It’s been around for thousands of years,” she says. “So of course, there are no new techniques.”

But her answer is to make the work personal. “The way to stand out is to have something that’s very truthful and honest and original. By portraying myself through my glass art, the viewer or the audience are going to know that is me.”

MacIver moves between printmaking, sculpture, painting and poetry, and her practice has become a form of activism. Her current work reframes Greek mythology from a female point of view – a project that began with a realisation she couldn’t ignore.

“Most religious texts, myths – they’re recorded throughout the world and used for the basis of all our societies – have been written from a male point of view.”

For MacIver, that’s where originality lives. “It doesn’t necessarily mean the idea has to be unique. It’s possibly more that the representation is original.”

As lead materiality designer at Jaguar, Goulée oversees everything you touch, feel and see inside a vehicle. His team put travertine stone inside the Type 00 concept car and finished the exterior in a colour so saturated it made people question whether the car was real or not.

“People online or people who see it in real life were like, I can’t actually believe it’s real, even though it’s here,” he says. However, that was just the reaction he wanted that reaction – for Goulée, discomfort is the point.

“To describe a design that would be successful for me, I would say polarising. If it’s comfortable, it doesn’t work for me. If it’s polarising, it then creates debate.”

What connects all three is a conviction that the work has to come from somewhere honest. “I can’t lie to myself when I do something,” says Goulée. “Everything we do as creators and as designers needs to come from the heart.”

All three films in The Creators season two are available now on Attitude’s YouTube channel.