Surge — Tie-Dye Cartoon Abstract Character, Surf Club, Biarritz

The club has eighty members, most of them under twenty-five, and a building that looks like a public toilet. They wanted something for the frontage and they wanted it to be theirs rather than the town’s.

The brief, from the members

A character, about 2.4 m, cartoon, no identity. Its body had to swell outward at the bottom. And it had to be tie-dyed, because the club’s own rash vests and its forty-year-old club flag are tie-dyed and nobody can quite explain why.

A body with no legs

The brief did the compositional work for us. We removed the legs entirely and let the body expand downward into a broad, flared base, so the figure reads as something that has come up out of the sea and is standing on the promenade in a way that should not be possible. Two short arms lifted slightly. Head oversized and round, two simple eyes, nothing else.

A figure with no legs and no feet should look like an object. Ours does not, for one reason: the head is tilted back about six degrees, as though looking at the water. That was the last change we made and it is the only thing holding the character together.

Dye on a carved surface

Tie-dye is not a pattern; it is a record of how fabric resisted dye. The rings are never true circles, and at every boundary there is a zone where two colours have bled into each other with a raw, irregular edge.

Ours is painted in a dye sequence: white ground, then eleven concentric rings over the body in four colours, each one laid with a wet edge so it bleeds into the one inside it. Nothing on the piece has a hard outline. The rings are deliberately off-centre on the flared base, as though the garment had been bunched when it was tied.

On the promenade

It stands at 2.4 m directly outside the club doors, where the salt air reaches it every day. The finish is a two-pack system with a heavy clear coat precisely because of that, and after a full season of Atlantic weather the colour has not moved. The members wipe it with the same cloths they use on the rescue boards.