Dominic had arranged for us to meet him in the park near his studio in Bethnal Green. We had no idea why. Our only instruction was to find the sculpture in the middle of the green.


When we arrived we saw the statue immediately. Trapped in it’s orbit was a single cyclist, pedalling relentlessly, round and round in tight circles. Surely it couldn’t be him?

- It was. And he had a puncture. This was a more significant event for Dominic than you might imagine.

Mr Wilcox refuses to get into a pigeon hole. He’s neither an engineer, illustrator nor artist (though he has many of their respective skills). If anything, he’s an occupational thinker; an ideator.


Dominic’s practice is so refreshing because, though his craft has matured, he’s miraculously retained the energy and enthusiasm of an art college undergraduate. The ‘real world’, with all it’s expectation management and deadlines, tax self-assessments, hasn’t left an imprint on him. This makes Dominic something of a celebrated Peter Pan figure in the design community.

Here Dominic explains why we were in that cold drizzly park.

Full Interview:

Think-Work-Play: Do you often find that you come up with a lot of your ideas outside of the studio?

Dominic Wilcox: Yeah, I don’t really spend much time in the studio. I’ve got one but I keep going there and thinking ‘Right, what do I do?’. It’s really there to make stuff and do drawings, but mostly it’s just wandering around outside and having a look.

TWP: How many sketches do you do a day on average?

DW: There’s not an average but if I’m really trying to come up with an idea for a sketch nothing comes to mind for about 5 hours. If I think about something else and just relax I might just come up with one, so it might be one a day and that’s a really frustrating day but sometimes it comes really quickly so there’s no rules.

TWP: Is humour important to your design work?

DW: I don’t go out to be humorous but it does come out that way I guess. What I do is an expression of me and I think everything everybody does is an expression of themselves, or at least it should be and if it’s not then you’re probably doing the wrong thing.

TWP: Do you see yourself as a designer or an artist?

DW: That question of ‘Are you a designer or are you an artist or whatever?’ keeps coming up but to be honest with you I’m a bit tired of it and I cant be bothered. I just do what I do and if people want to show things in an art gallery then it becomes art. It’s for other people really I’m not that interested.

TWP: How do you prototype your ideas?

DW: I think it through as far as I possibly can. Obviously the quickest way to do it is with a sketchbook, but then it comes to a point where – particulaly with the good ones – where you can visualise it in your head, so you have to make it. So, then I’ll go buy some materials, bring them back and test out what I think might happen. I’ll test it and either it happens or something surprising happens, which is always a bonus because I think some of the most interesting work is when you have an idea but something happens when you put this onto that, or melt that, or you stretch this, and you create something that you could never have imagined with a sketchbook and a pen, sitting and thinking.

TWP: I remember you saying with the ‘Field’ ( Pictured ) project that the original intention wasn’t for the shoelaces to look like grass, how did that evolve?

DW: With Field, I was trying to come up with ideas for shoes. This was when I was living in Berlin. I just had the idea to make the shoes float. Then I thought I could have the laces coming down onto a table and maybe the laces were stiffened or strengthened so the shoes looked like they were floating away. Then I put it down, went out of the room – came back – and I saw the laces hovering in the air and I thought ‘there’s some magic in there’, and I got that feeling where you see through the fog and think ‘that’s good. There’s something in that’.

TWP: With the speed creation you did for the anti design festival, did the restrictions you gave yourself help or hinder your process and did you enjoy it?

DW: With the speed creating I wanted to push myself and put myself in a difficult position, y’know, put pressure on myself. It’s easy to float along because when your doing your own projects you can give yourself as much deadline as you want, but I wanted to force myself into a position where I could completely fail and embarrass myself in front of lots of people, which is a good motivation to try and do something. On The Variations On Normal I did a lot of sketches and I was getting away a little bit from making things. I wanted to get back into making things, so that was another reason for doing the speed creating project. I just started on day one and started to regret doing it by day three, but there was no turning back so I had to keep on going, so the pressure was very important to stop myself from over thinking, y’know? You tend to think too much about things before doing, you sort of rule it out: ‘I can’t do that because of this’, instead of just doing it. Just buy it, try it and see what happens. In many ways, if it was a disaster and the object at the end is not interesting, it’s really that the object is evidence of what had gone on before, y’know? That’s the way I think of the end objects: as just evidence. And whats really interesting to me is the process of getting there and the journey I took ‘cos that is like a holiday for my head.

TWP: A lot of the stuff you make is hand-made, do you value DIY more than getting things professionally manufactured?

DW: The reason why I tend to do things that are quite hand made or one-off things is because… I don’t know if it’s the way I was brought up, but you make the most of what you’ve got, y’know? Like I opened a cupboard in the kitchen at home and it was empty, and instead of thinking ‘there’s an empty cupboard there’, I was just standing looking at it imagining what I could do inside that empty cupboard. I could stretch that across there, y’know? You make things from nothing and I quite enjoy doing that, like a challenge: it’s something that gives me satisfaction to turn an uninteresting thing into something interesting. And of course these things are all at hand, so I’m just walking around the streets or I’m in the kitchen.

TWP: Was the pre-handshake device born out of an anxiety you had? Did you need something to help you shake somebody’s hand?

DW: This pre-handshake handshake device exists really because I do follow the news quite a lot and I suppose yes I have seen people in situations where they fall out with people and they want to get over it but they don’t know how and they can’t even bear to shake hands with the other person. I wanted to give a little help. There is an element of humour there. There’s not meant to be, but it is making a satirical comment I suppose about the ridiculousness of how two people, whether they are political leaders or people on the street, fall out and aren’t able to make up because they can’t even shake hands. So this was showing how ridiculous that can be. I don’t see this as an art piece I see it as a product, a thing that you can buy in a shop. It could be in a marriage counseling place or I was gonna send them to politicians or it could just be in a household that have regular arguments.