Rick Wright

Richard Wright, fabled keyboard player from popular rock and roll ensemble Pink Floyd, made a solo album in 1996. Apart from the hallmarks of his lyricism and keyboard swashes, the theme of the album concerned,... read more narratively speaking, the emotional breakdown of someone, occasioned by some unstated trauma followed by subsequent attempts at recovery. In essence there was a time before and a time after the breakdown - the former characterised by a wholeness and the latter by a broken quality. We imagined a human figure that was half natural and half fractured, yet being one and the same person. They say work begets work and this design was an adaptation of an uncompleted earlier idea about a magic disc through which one could pass as if through a time gate, from one zone to another. For Rick’s record we saw a woman divided by a disc of water, being whole and natural as she dived in, legs of flesh and bone, but fractured as she came though the other side, the upper body now made of broken china. It seemed an elegant and lyrical way of suggesting a breakdown, in sympathy with the music, and appropriate that the fractured half was literally made of pieces of broken china like a cracked jug (the back cover was the reverse, broken china legs and flesh or mended upper body to indicate the recovery). Also appropriate that the trauma was represented by a disc of water, not something heavy and dark, but more lyrical and liquid like the music.