Mario Hugo

CA: Why is the craft or handmade element so important to you?
MH: I don’t want it to sound too grandiose, but this is the way I think about it: we grew up in the last generation before the internet; to me there’s something very nostalgic about working by hand. I work digitally all the time, mind you, but when I work on a drawing it’s exclusive to paper. I don’t really take it into the computer at any point – only to scan it and put it online; I don’t manipulate the imagery – and something about it feels very honest and warm to me, and I can’t necessarily put my finger on it. But again, I grew up just before computers were in every facet of our lives. Maybe that’s where it comes from, but I’m not certain.


CA: You mentioned your friend Mike Perry. He makes books, and many designers are making their own magazines, garments, pillows, crockery sets... Why do you think this movement is so popular?
MH: I think that designers universally share a love of craft, and I think that the world we grew up in was very modernised and very commercial. It’s interesting when you talk about plates or ceramics; I think when I was a kid I was sitting there with plates with Transformers all over them, or GI Joe. The world was such a particularly commercial monster, and then we were exposed to the internet and things became very ephemeral. Things only exist on someone’s screen, and I think that there’s a certain degree of counter culture and counter current to the internet that’s really begun rising up over the last few years. There is something very beautiful and tangible in tactile objects, whether it’s things we make for ourselves, things that we make to sell or things that we make to exhibit.


CA: Real physical qualities are important to you, so do you worry about the death of print and things like that?
MH: I have worked on the internet for a long time, but I truly believe in the beauty of tactile things. The only thing I can hope is that other people believe in that kind of beauty too. I still think that there’s some kind of inherent romance in things made by hand and in things that you can pick up and hold and smell. Even in my drawings I tend to work on found paper; I scavenge the used bookstores for paper and I tear out the flysheets in the front and back of the books. For me it’s a ritual, working by hand. It feels very honest. I just hope that there’s a certain number of people in our culture that also crave that particular quality – that tactility, that tangibility.

http://www.computerarts.co.uk/in_depth/interviews/mario_hugo