Dan Edwards and The Senator Group

we can do more

we can do more is a call to action, turning the humble employer’s handbook into a springboard for small acts of individual activism.

Chelsea College of Art and Design graduate, Dan Edwards works across different mediums as a way of interrogating personal and cultural anxieties. Edwards was partnered with The Senator Group, a design-led furniture manufacturer established in 1976, where he was influenced by their unique ethos to disrupt the accepted narrative of how a manufacturer would normally behave.

Finding inspiration in handbooks detailing the company’s positive, ‘can do’ culture while in residency, Edwards plays with rule-enforcing signs that inform our everyday life, and instead, looks to encourage play and positivity.

Artists can often give a new perspective, or approach to a problem that is useful for industry. This is when collaboration is at its best. – Gemma Vaughan, The Senator Group

Using factory processes, 27 wooden signs were created featuring nine slogans, installed on main roads and side streets in Blackburn to form a trail for festival visitors to follow. These vibrant, mono-coloured signs utilise the typeface ‘Transport’ designed by Margaret Calvert for British road signs in 1957, subverting the connotations of what we look for in these everyday occurrences.

we can do more included a series of benches located in Cathedral Square, made for the festival using The Senator Group’s design and manufacturing expertise. Emblazoned with the words: we can do more, we were reminded that we can make more, speak more, share more, sing more, dance more, smile more, play more.

I’m excited by what we can achieve together as makers, thinkers and disruptors. I think that together, we have the opportunity to make something exceptional. – Dan Edwards

The Artist

A graduate of the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London-based Dan Edwards has worked at the heart of the British art world as a renowned picture framer, a career which has fed into his own practice with a naturally developing interest in the preservation, presentation and perception of contemporary artworks. Edwards works across different mediums as a way of interrogating personal and cultural anxieties.

The Manufacturer

The Senator Group is a design-led furniture manufacturer established in 1976 by present day chairman Colin Mustoe MBE to create places to meet, dine and work with a difference. Outside the marquee showroom in Clerkenwell, London and sites in Chicago, New York and Madrid – the group’s principle manufacturing site is in Accrington, where £10 million has been invested in its state-of- the-art desk factory alone, from which over 300,000 desks, tables, storage systems and screens are exported every year.