If you’ve always fancied owning your own alien, now you can. We worked with artist Henrik Delehag to create 3 new species for the launch of the Vollebak Spaceshop. Luckily they’re designed to hang on your wall, rather than eat you.
Henrik thinks we are all stuck in a soul-sucking temporal loop.
And it’s mostly because last Wednesday has the same name as this Wednesday and next Wednesday. Ditto Thursday, Friday etc etc.
“We’re going around in these weekly circles that we group into four, a slightly bigger circle, and then in a group of 12, and then that goes round in a circle,” he says. “It doesn’t rhyme well with human progress. We just feel like we are doing the same thing over and over.”
This isn’t just idle grouching. Henrik really has it in for the Gregorian calendar. And he’s been developing an alternative – the modestly named ‘Delehag calendar.’
Each day gets a new, unique name, and its own hand-drawn icon or ‘god.’ And so far, he’s created names and icons for 1,000 days.
Henrik’s work challenges the assumptions and consensual systems that we’ve stopped thinking about. He wants to help us to make the everyday new and strange. And to think about what’s beyond the known… which is exactly why we wanted to work with him.
So we asked Henrik to imagine 3 aliens the Spaceshop might encounter on its first intergalactic delivery round. Or on Earth. Depending on what you think lives here.
“I’m interested in investigating areas where science hasn’t really reached,” he says. “That’s what made me so excited about creating these four creatures that we've never seen before. No one can come and say that these aliens don’t exist because who knows.”
Henrik first task was researching older imaginings of extraterrestrial life.
He didn’t find much beyond little green men, the elongated bug-eyed ‘grey’ aliens and walking exposed nervous systems. This allowed him more creative space. But, he says, the project was still an imaginative leap.
“That was the hardest thing, finding four aliens that were so different they could represent four different parts of the universe,” he says. “They had to complement each other while being completely separate.”
Before he started, Henrik resisted giving the aliens any kind of origin or back story, chemical composition or even names. Though he has slowly filled in the blanks. The critical thing was that they exist as forms, as stark icons, not necessarily threatening or friendly, cute or monstrous, but very strange and hard to forget.
“My ambition is always to create something that just burns itself onto your retina,” he says.
Henrik says he loved science fiction as a kid. “It opened you up to imaginary worlds, filled your brain with new possibilities, things we should investigate,” he says.
“The thing that really excited me about the Spaceshop is the excitement of exploration,” he says. “For me, it belongs here on Earth as much as it does out in space. There’s so much undiscovered here on Earth. We should apply an astronaut’s curiosity and sense of wonder here. And Vollebak seems to be making things to make that possible.”
They come framed and mounted, and measure 110cm x 80cm. And they promise not to eat you.
