Not So Great Depression

A discarded green wine bottle, given a full life story. The semester started with one rule: pick an ordinary object, find its character, and tell its story. I chose a bottle from the backyard of an old winery, covered in dust and sticker residue, the kind of thing nobody looks at twice. Its traits: bulky, see-through but misleading, gloomy.

Meet No Name

No Name. September 1995 – present. A standard green soda-lime wine bottle, made by automated moulding to protect wine from light, designed to be handled, never looked at. Filled, emptied, and left in the backyard of an old winery. Pulled out once for an exhibition, then set aside again: only its crate was chosen, as a seat. It now lives in my locker at FH Joanneum.

I carry nothing inside, yet I feel heavy with all the moments I held and the ones that never came.

Drawing a character

Before any layout, I drew the bottle until its personality showed: one expressive line, a pattern of lines, a rendered form on tracing paper. The sketches became the first poster, The not so Great Depression.

Light through green glass

In the photo studio the bottle showed its best trait: light passes through it and leaves a green, rippling shadow. See-through, but never clear. The shadow became the bottle’s second body.

Not so great

For a typo-photography exercise I cut the words Not So Great from red paper, laid them inside the shadow, and then let them fall. The title slowly loses its shape, just like the bottle’s hope.

The zine

The final piece folds the whole story into one long strip. The photographs turn blue, the text stays black, and wide empty panels slow you down: you unfold the bottle’s life at the speed it lived it.