Lucky Prawn, Artistic Co-operative
The name’s the first oddity; Lucky Prawn. Then you meet the duo. Fred is shorter than Laura. Laura is prettier than Fred. They look fun. They are fun, but most of all - they embody ideas. And that’s what really counts, right?
A shop, a studio and creative co-operative, Lucky Prawn is Laura Clauscen & Fred Mora – two creatives who both stem from a background in art direction, experiential design and curatorial practices – and that’s pretty much what they do now.
Working independently and in collaboration with others, Lucky Prawn cultivate, capture and distribute exciting online and offline content ranging from the land of art, publishing and even food.
For Sample Brew, they created Gold Unattainable. It really was. We’ll let them explain it.
What attracted you to the concept of ‘gold is the only love’ and how did it inform the result you produced?
For Lucky Prawn the ethereal nature of gold is seeded deep within its unattainability. Inevitably, throughout our lives we attempt to fabricate the things we cant have. We created a machine that is both aspirational and utopian, a perfect construction that could not create gold.
What tools and/or technologies did you utilise in the work process of the piece you created?
Beginners carpentry, power tools, YouTube tutorials, laborious Bunning’s visits, salvaged mechanical elements, favors, powder coating, Ute Hire and sound design by Alex Albrecht.
As a designers is there a particular characteristic that you feel makes your work unique?
Lucky Prawn outcomes rely on personality beyond aesthetics. Erotic, playful and macabre undertones often punctuate our work. And because our artistic practice isn’t particularly specialised, we have no limitations on the creative outcomes we yield. We will often jump from one trade or material to the next, bypassing rudimentary actualities to get to a unique solution using only calculated naivety.
Jonathan Zawada said that the most effective way to think about a creative solution is not to think about it at all. Do you agree?
For us, inevitably the solution we think we have naturally progresses into a better solution by the end of the project. Like Zawada it is important for us to let the process run its course, this usually includes feasts over steaming Kimchi hotpots or a trawl through the hardware store. For each project there are many Lucky Prawn solutions, for us it is important to settle on the one that feels suddenly right.
Experimentation is the leading method Sample Brew uses to break the opinion of norms both in perception and production. How do you utilise experimentation in your own work?
Experimentation fuels Lucky Prawn outcomes. For us, conceptualisation and ideation comes hot and fast, but it is the precarious experimentation required to guide a project to fruition that gives us strong and original results.
Last but not least, describe Gold Ale in five words or less.
For those with discerning taste
