LUCY DYSON
Our 2020 Australian Christmas Gin label features a diversity of Australians all enjoying Christmas together in a surreal outdoor landscape all captured in collage using found vintage images.
Our Australian Christmas Gin has always been the perfect blend of nostalgia, tradition and a very modern Australian approach to making gin. How else could you describe turning a 1968 Woman’s Weekly recipe and a decades’ long family tradition into an iconic craft gin made by distilling Christmas puddings and barrel-ageing gin in hundred-year-old Muscat barrels called Statler and Waldorf?
At the heart of our love for this gin has been our approach to the label. Each year commissioning an Australian artist to create a unique piece that speaks to the uniquely Australian Christmas experience – hot, outdoors and immersed in nature (and gin). We then place that artwork on our label with minimal branding getting in their way of the artist’s creative vision.
For obvious reasons, our brief this year was a little different. In addition to wanting to celebrate the Australian experience of Christmas, we also wanted to say something about the year we’ve all had, and the Christmas we hope to have. So we looked for an artist who we felt could capture the Christmases of times gone by, when we could all celebrate together, sharing a drink, sharing a dance and sharing a Christmas pudding. And it was that search for someone who could celebrate nostalgia in a deeply modern way that led us to Lucy Dyson.
Represented by Michael Reid (with galleries in Sydney, Berlin and Murrurindi), Lucy is a super-talented Australian artist and animator, born and raised in Melbourne and now based in Berlin.
After completing a Media Arts Degree specialising in Animation, Lucy spent two years in London before settling in Berlin. Lucy’s collages have been commissioned for numerous album covers and exhibited in major galleries, museums and arts festivals.
Her work has been exhibited and screened at The National Gallery of Victoria, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Australian Embassy in Berlin and at Melbourne and Sydney International Film Festivals as well as the Berlin Music Video Awards.
When not creating and animating stunning collage pieces using found objects and vintage imagery, Lucy Dyson is also an award-winning music-video director. To date she has independently directed and produced over fifty music videos working with musicians including Gotye, Ray LaMontange, Paul Kelly and someone we’ve never heard of called Beyoncé. She also made a jaunty little piece for us.
Now focusing more and more on her art, we reckon Lucy is one of Australia’s most exciting emerging artists and we’re thrilled to feature her art on our label before the wider world discovers her.
The resulting artwork from our collaboration is called Our Christmas Pudding. It features a diversity of Australians all enjoying Christmas together in a surreal outdoor landscape all captured in collage using found vintage images.
In the artwork we dance, we hug, we walk, we eat, we drink, we hold hands, we swap jokes and above all we’re together. Let’s hope as much of that comes true for all of us this Christmas (responsibly, of course). Thanks Lucy for creating something so perfect… it literally brought a tear to a few eyes as it went down our bottling line in Healesville.
Happy Christmas everyone, wherever you are and whoever you get to share a slice of Christmas pudding and a nip of gin with.
