Award winning Australasian singer-songwriter Jen Cloher’s 5th studio album ‘I Am The River, The River Is Me’ is an exploration of her Māori heritage, community and queerness. This is a special record that pays tribute to the past and the future, blending the personal and the political and showing that everything is interconnected. 

Working closely with Jen we began a beautiful collaboration to capture the beauty of her lyricism, the cultural significance and symbology of the album. We began looking to the water, landscapes and rivers of New Zealand and the culturally significant stone, pounamu (a type of jade) that is sacred to her and her Māori ancestors. The outcome developed into a typographic and photographic focused design. Finding inspiration in the green of the pounamu stone, we created a green marbled vinyl and further brought the green into meandering typography across the vinyl and campaign. The resulting design confidently embraces the quiet of negative space and typographic poetry. I made the decision to print the vinyl’s lyrics sheet onto tracing paper, enveloping the inner sleeve of the vinyl, to create layers of transparency within the design. The resulting layers of typography and photography create meandering rivers of consciousness and contemplativeness, of the past and present political and cultural currents, seen in Aotearoa (New Zealand).