A pre-history of Antistatic in 5 projects: 1999-2014
We’ve been working together on client and creative projects since 2016, but our collaborative efforts as siblings go back much further than that. Below, we take a time machine back to 1999 in order to show you 5 projects we did together before we started working together as a job. Think of it as a creative pre-history of Antistatic.
Kelly’s high school art, 1999
Until we left home, many of the creative activities we did together could be more accurately described as “Kelly bossing her little sister around”, although Anna was mostly a willing participant. Kelly’s 7th form (high school senior) sculpture portfolio took George Segal and Christo and Jeanne Claude as artist models. Since wrapping a whole building was out of the question, she went for a more human scale with human models… usually Anna. One sculpture involved making an upper body plaster cast of Anna, and another consisted of wrapping her in sheets of plastic and rope before taking her in a wheelbarrow to the empty lot on the corner of our street for a photoshoot.
Clockwise from left: Anna wrapped in plastic sheeting and rope and ready to be transported to photoshoot in a wheelbarrow; Anna and Mini Cooper, both wrapped in industrial clingfilm and cord; Kelly preparing Anna for a leg plaster cast.
Matching tattoo, 2003
At the end of 2002, a family holiday at Waihi beach would change our lives (physically) forever. On the fridge at the rental bach* sat a magnet which proudly proclaimed “Sisters by Chance, Friends by Choice”. We thought it was the most ironically hilarious thing, and joked about getting it tattooed on us later that summer at the Big Day Out music festival. A year later, after wisely taking some time to consider whether we wanted to make a corny joke permanent, we were at Crazy Horse Tattoo in Dunedin getting matching “By Choice” tattoos.
BZP article, Critic Te Arohi, 2004
Back before synthetic stimulant benzylpiperazine (popularly known as BZP) was made a Class C substance and pulled from smoke shops and corner stores around New Zealand, we were given a bunch of “party pill” trial packs and an assignment to write a feature for the Otago University student magazine Critic. Over one chaotic week, we each took three different types of party pill and proceeded to try and have a good time. It was not a good time, but it made for excellent stunt journalism.
Kelly (left) and Anna (right) prepare to ingest a dose. Image credit: photo by Craig McNab, published in Critic Te Arohi, 11 October 2004.
The big sweater, 2004
One summer when we were both home from university for the Christmas holidays, we spent many hours buying second hand sweaters from our home town op shops (thrift stores), cutting them up, and stitching them together into a giant mutant garment. With the help of our brother, we installed it early one morning over a concrete bollard near downtown and it stayed in place for what seemed like a long time. Eventually it disappeared without a trace — we like to think some students rescued it to use as a couch cover or weird blanket.
Left: Anna and Kelly standing in front of the bollard immediately following the early-morning installation. Right: documentation of the covered bollard in its full daytime glory.
Grandad’s letter, 2014
Our grandad, Cecil, was a motorcycle dispatch driver during World War II. During his time deployed to Greece in 1941 he wrote a long letter to his father, which we understand he got past the censors inside a rolled-up carpet mailed back to New Zealand. The letter describes many of his experiences and displays both a wry sense of humor and a growing distrust of authority. The letter had been typed out by a friend of grandad’s sister who was in a typing pool, and a cropped photocopy of this version made its way to our dad. After painstakingly typing it out from the photocopy, filling in the missing words as he went, dad asked us to edit the letter to make it easier to read. We were initially reluctant to mess with the letter, but it was written as a stream-of-consciousness with pages-long paragraphs, and sentences that jumped from topic to topic making it hard to follow. In our edit, we took as light a touch as possible to make the letter readable while keeping authorial intent. This was the first project we did together that has echoes of how we work today – working through a written document line-by-line while on a call with each other.
*for non-New Zealand readers, a bach (pronounced “batch”) is a rustic vacation house or cabin, often near a beach.
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Header image credit: Kelly and Anna wearing a conjoined sweater during the BZP chronicles week. Photo by Craig McNab.