Two Times Elliott celebrate the discontinued one-pound note with their very own studio currency

In November, we were contacted to take part in the Two Pages project, a series of nomadic sketchbooks that aim to connect the international creative community through a hand-to-hand journey, run by Konstantinos Trichas. For this 10 years anniversary edition, Two Pages was reaching out to London studios to create a response to a given theme, the ‘£1 coin.’

Opportunities like these are always a good time for us to think wider and use our workshop series as a space for experiments and challenge ideas further.

In some ways, Two Pages acts as an archive of valuable traces of creative inputs from all over the world and champions cultural influences by recording mark-making for the years to come. Given the pound coin theme, we started to investigate the history of the British pound and realised that there was an interesting parallel to make.

In 1983, it was announced by the government that the £1 note would be completely phased out and replaced by the £1 coin. It’s been 40 years since the humble £1 banknote ceased to exist, erasing one of the most important cultural icons of the country. 

We used this workshop as an opportunity to pay a tribute to the one-pound note that ceased to circulate, and the sketchbook was the perfect vessel to archive our visual artefacts. 

We wanted to create our own studio currency, one that will represent the individuals of the studio and their varied cultural backgrounds. It is often said that banknotes are like a country’s business card. Through our Two Times Elliott banknotes, we aimed to showcase the quintessential aspect of our studio culture, traditions, language and icons, finding ways to encapsulate these aspects in our design contributions.

A banknote is made of various combined elements. Based around a list of components (cultural icons, monetary symbols and patterns), studio members were asked to create visual responses for each of these elements, with their geographic and cultural backgrounds in mind. The medium was kept open; working with mixed-media such as found imagery, 3D, collages, mark-making or digital inputs – allowing for more diverse outcomes.

All elements were later scanned and used as layers to create the final pound notes which have been screen printed into the two pound sketchbook, and added into the nomadic archive.

Two Times Elliott