Rains Journal

Frederic Forest has been invited by the Danish Fashion House of Rains to write a graphic story with the theme of “Adapt”. It follows the daily journey of an architect.

Rains : What does adapting mean to you?
Frederic Forest : Adapting, to me, is not merely a simple gesture or a one-time thing. It represents an ongoing process, day-to-day, every day, over the span of a person’s lifetime. To me, adapting requires many layers that you can peel off or add on based on what your body requires. A body is constantly adapting to our environment, to the architecture around us, weather, people, emotions, and so on. Adapting is in many ways, I think, our body’s journey. Although our core may always stay the same, our body is constantly in dialogue with us through adaptation.

Rains : How did you work with the concept of adapting and its meaning in your drawings?
Frederic Forest : My approach was to tell the story of a body that is adapting throughout the day. By turning the pages, back and forth, the reader gets to participate and also alter the steps of this cycle. The body, either female or male, travels through time and takes in various emotions based on time and space. The images function as diptychs with both a silhouette and abstract typography studies that act as architectural cues such as the corner of a street. In this way, the two images dialogue with each other in order to tell the story.

Rains : What’s your story behind the series of drawings?
Frederic Forest : The story is about a day in the life of an architect. The series begin with a body warming up, perhaps getting out of the shower, beginning his or her daily ritual to face the day. Next, he or she leaves to experience the day and what it has to offer – at this point, his or her hand is not in the pocket, but it is out and active – alert and open to feel. The hand being one of the primary sensory vectors of the body, is a way to say that if the hand is activated then so is the brain, to feeling all that is around. The third scene depicts a moment during the day in which something is explained – details are there but it all remains abstract. Something is being explained and shared, and two hands are coming together – either the two hands of the architect or two hands of two strangers joining. After this, we observe a scene of decompression where the person is heading out, perhaps to dinner or to meet someone. In the final scene, we see that the person has come full circle and is ready to go back “home” to a place that feels safe or like a cocoon. The feeling of being warm and safe is signaled by the hands coming together in a loving gesture.