Fashion, Film, & Fantasy: The World of Shona Heath

• Growing up in the British countryside in a modern sixties home, Heath remembers an upbringing spent outdoors, where she became intrigued with visions of scale; her mother’s crafts were also a deep influence.
• She started her career in costume design and was moved to create a set from paper for Dazed, which turned into requests for shop windows and later collaborations with Tim Walker.
• Heath’s creative process begins with words or an image, but usually, the former encourages original image-making and visualizing.
• She sees tools like AI as potentially good research tools but detrimental to her own particular craft; its use depends on the artist and their authenticity.
• She recommends working independently rather than starting as an assistant to an established artist, as then you know how to forge your own path first.
• Though she used to feel that she experienced “excessive input” when doing a project, she now feels she can better communicate her vision and appease clients and collaborators up front.
• She prefers the immediacy and direct access of working in photography to working on film sets; Heath remarks she wouldn’t be interested in doing a period piece that didn’t have an added element of creativity like Poor Things—a film she worked on with James Price, whose decades of film expertise Heath leaned on.
• Fashion’s tendency for retro revisits and zeitgeist trends plays well into her work (as opposed to interior design, which she says has more of a lag time between trends and the trend’s appearance in the culture).
• Her work on Poor Things won her an Academy Award for Best Production Design.

‍Notable Quotes:

• On her mother: “She was, she still is—she still approaches new projects or new things, even that she hasn’t done with the absolute belief she can do them. So I suppose I mimicked and saw that and also had the added value of watching her do it as well.” —Shona Heath
• On Tim Walker: “Tim and I have quite aligned childhoods; actually, probably the question you asked me to begin with, you’d get a pretty similar answer from him. He grew up in a countryside and was also looking at scale and we all have the same sort of childhood TV and illustration references and stories we used to lose ourselves in.” —Shona Heath
• “Actually, a word or a script is a really brilliant blank canvas with a sort of a diving board on it.” —Shona Heath
• “I’ve got here because I made tons of mistakes.” —Shona Heath
• “If you see too much done too well in an organized way, maybe you feel like you can’t achieve it without all that setup or resources behind you. And you can, if you’ve got the determination.” —Shona Heath
• “I love photography. I love still imagery. I like the control and the actual sort of level of cheating you can put into the setup or the situation…You can do much more immediate physical solutions to problems, which means you can do creative things you can’t do in film as easily.” —Shona Heath
• “The job of the production designer is to be the visualizer to make sure everybody else involved in that team, from the scriptwriter, the actor, the actress, the crew who are building it, sound, everything, that everybody can believe the same world that they’re about to work on and film and record. And it starts by being able to talk in visual language and design this whole world.” —Shona Heath
• “It’s that sort of constant wanting to do something new or create something that I haven’t seen. It’s that that keeps you moving. And I think it is the same for fashion designers or people who work in hair or makeup or fashion, it’s that feeling, and that need to move on.” —Shona Heath
• On Poor Things: “I’ve loved that connection with a sort of a wider group of people than who used to see my fashion work.” —Shona Heath
• “I think what is contemporary now is what is contemporary always, which I can only think of as human beings and the sort of live conversation we have because I think anything that’s made or produced by the time that future idea has become a reality and is consumed by the masses, it’s mainstream and nearly over and therefore not contemporary. So I think it’s conversation, maybe? Communication.” —Shona Heath