The archive · Design & Visual · Product decision · 2022
Dry Cleaning's Stumpwork LP art casts bathroom objects as the record's own parts
Rottingdean Bazaar and Annie Collinge photographed bathroom objects that mirror the LP's anatomy — a plughole becomes the record's centre sticker.
Dry Cleaning
What it had to solve
Rottingdean Bazaar had spent years making lettering from pubic hair in physical artworks, and faced the question of how to bring that practice into Dry Cleaning's album artwork. Working with co-designer and photographer Annie Collinge, the change of context led them to soap — and from soap to the objects of the bathroom.
How it works
When Dry Cleaning's album needed artwork, artist duo Rottingdean Bazaar had a context problem: their practice was lettering made from pubic hair in physical artworks, and they had to find out how that could live on a record sleeve. Working with co-designer and photographer Annie Collinge, considering how to contextualise the work led them to soap — and soap led them to the bathroom.
The trio collected bathroom objects and used them to form the design, building visual connections with the song titles and lyrics. Each object was photographed so that its physical structure related to a different part of the LP packaging.
The idea makes the record's own anatomy part of the artwork: a plughole, for instance, stands in for the vinyl sticker at the centre of the disc, so the sleeve reads as a set of visual rhymes between the bathroom, the songs and the physical object in the buyer's hands.
D&AD's awards archive carries the Stumpwork LP among its graphic design winners. The page records the concept and its making rather than sales or chart figures, so the case stands on the design itself: an album sleeve built object by object, where every part of the record has a photographed counterpart.
Why it lands
- It turns a constraint — the duo's unusual material needed a new context — into a whole visual system rather than a single cover image.
- Matching objects to the LP's physical parts, with a plughole as the centre sticker, makes the medium itself carry the concept.
- Soap keeps the artists' transgressive craft while making it appropriate for a widely distributed album sleeve.
- Photographed bathroom objects create a cohesive, strange visual world that can be reproduced across vinyl, CD and digital formats.
What it did
The artwork turned a material problem into a coherent visual world: every element of the sleeve is a photographed bathroom object, and the packaging's own anatomy becomes part of the design. D&AD's archive carries the LP among its graphic design winners, recording the concept as the outcome — packaging remembered for the strangeness of its material logic.
What you can take
When a signature material is too raw for a new context, translate it into a neighbouring one — soap for hair — and let the product's anatomy dictate the imagery.
Since then
D&AD's archive carries Dry Cleaning's Stumpwork LP in its graphic design winners; the page documents the making of the artwork and the concept rather than sales or chart positions. What persists is the packaging idea itself — a record sleeve designed as a set of photographed bathroom objects, each chosen to rhyme with the songs and to stand in for a physical part of the LP.
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