Hide Fidelity

Alex Randall is a lighting designer, artist and maker whose work often features taxidermy. But, asks Emma Love, what’s with the Freddie Mercury statue?

Walking into the Russian Club for the launch of Alex Randall’s latest lighting collection, it’s impossible not to notice Freddie Mercury. In Randall’s hands, the former Queen frontman has been transformed into a lifesize, rawhide light, cast from a statue in Montreux. ‘I was looking for a really big statue in the UK, but trying to get through the red tape took months. At first I thought it would be awful to do Freddie; it’s the 65th birthday celebrations and I didn’t want to jump on the bandwagon. Then I realised that people go on pilgrimages to see the statue, and I became really interested in the idea,’ says Randall, who is auctioning her Freddie off in aid of the Mercury Phoenix Trust set up in his name.

The 29-year old doesn’t usually spend her time casting cultural legends though. Since she started designing bespoke and one-off lights six years ago she’s made her name through continually experimenting with materials and crossing the fine line between traditional crafts, art and design. Having grown up in Berkshire – from the age of eight ‘sticking lightbulbs in shoes, rocks, anything’, and tinkering around learning about wiring from her grandfather, an electrician – it was almost by chance that she ended up designing lights for a living. She did a sculpture degree at Chelsea College of Art and Design, and an MA in Professional Writing at Falmouth College of Art, but left without a clue what to do next.

Back at home in Devon where her parents now live on a farm (her mum is retired and her dad owns a company that cleans up oil spills), Randall literally had her own lightbulb moment. ‘I was drawing a pig and on the telephone at the same time. I did a curly tail and put a phone on the end, with light beams coming out of it. I had a wave of inspiration and that was it. Then I started looking at other objects I could put light into and make useful again,’ she recalls. This pig was her first design, based on her grandmother’s Bakelite telephone – with a cymbal, gramophone speakers and wooden mannequin legs all subsequently being turned into lights.

Looking around the white Battersea studio where we’re now chatting over Earl Grey tea, it’s easy to see how this progression happened. On the shelves is an odd assortment of second-hand trinkets and antiques mixed in with the books you might expect. There’s a rams-head doorstop, Freddie is now back from the Russian Club and taking centre stage, while a line of lit-up, rawhide horses hang by their tails from butchers’ hooks. Randall, who loves nothing more than an afternoon wandering round a reclamation yard, is instantly likeable, and full of tales that make everything sound fun and anything sound possible.

Take the small matter of persuading Liberty to stock the Bakelite telephone. ‘I was walking around the stores in London trying to sell the phone, and I really wanted to meet Ross Urwin, who was the buyer of furniture at Liberty at the time. He refused to see me; I went anyway and followed him around the store and he still refused.’ Her next encounter with him was a few months later, when she found herself being judged by him for Liberty’s ‘most promising newcomer award’ at the London tradeshow Pulse. She was embarrassed but Urwin praised her persistence and gave her the award, and Liberty has stocked the Bakelite piece ever since (it’s also a favourite of Graham Norton, who bought the original, while Firmdale hotels have a wall of her Bakelite telephones in their New York hotel in Crosby Street).

Soon after, Randall expanded her repertoire into taxidermy, when she was asked to design the Ted Baker store in London’s Cheapside. They requested an Edwardian street scene, and she decided to include a flock of flying pigeons. ‘I didn’t know anyone else was interested in taxidermy,’ she says of the trend. ‘I just did it because it was a solution to what I was trying to find – and then I realised other young, female artists were doing it too.’ Today, Randall spends around 20 percent of her time making taxidermy pieces, which start from around £800. Whether it’s a duck or squirrel holding a lightbulb cord in its beak or mouth, or a pack of rats scrambling for the light, she follows her own golden rule – which is to make sure that the animals look very much alive, and are shown in as natural a position as possible.

Just as her taxidermy lights are a result of animals that have been culled or hunted and would otherwise be thrown away, she is also interested in waste from the food industry. Hence the rawhide that Freddie Mercury was fashioned from: ‘I was working with a local abattoir, looking at getting some bones from cows for a large rib-cage chandelier, and I kept thinking about how I could use skin. I took the head of a drum off a bongo and it kept its 3D form. I put it in water, wrapped it round something else and when it dried it kept the drum-head shape still. There’s nothing man-made that resembles it; it’s got real elasticity,’ explains Randall, bringing over a bucket of skins, which look like thick, wet dish cloths, to demonstrate their texture.

The rawhide has also been transformed into headless angels, cast from a copy of the Nike statue on show in the Louvre. ‘The first time I made an angel it was very dense, and I covered the statue totally in skin. I really tried to control what the material was doing and it didn’t quite work. Now I let the material do its own thing, so it flops over and the holes come through. I could wrap it around the same thing 100 times and every one would be slightly different,’ clarifies Randall, who sources the rawhide from one of the few tanneries left in the UK. Once a shape has been cast, each rawhide light takes around two days to dry, though in the bright Montreux sun, Freddie Mercury was far quicker (apparently if you try baking rawhide you end up with a crisp outside and soft centre, just like a badly cooked cake, so it has to dry naturally).

There are already signs that Randall may extend her inquisitive, material-led way of working beyond lighting to complete room concepts. She’s currently designing the lighting for Vance Garrett’s immersive theatre production of American Werewolf, which takes place in London’s Old Vic Tunnels in March, and collaborating on a book with American photographer Claire Rosen, Be-spoke, due out later this year. The images that the duo have produced together so far could easily grace the pages of a fashion glossy.

Randall recounts escapades from each shoot, from the gramophone chandelier hung from a friend’s hot-air balloon in a night sky, to the flock of pigeons lit up above Randall’s silhouette which was shot in spooky, haunted Bodmin prison at 1am – and The Last Supper, where pigs are pictured scoffing doughnuts laid out on a long table under two antique church chandeliers. ‘They started out taking tiny mouthfuls and then suddenly their eyes lit up and they just climbed on the table. They had such a sugar high and then crashed out totally. The next day they went to the abattoir,’ says Randall.