The Workings of a Wild Mind BY SKYE STRAUSS Exploring Bill Mitchell's wild and wonderful attic studio illustrates his use of collage as a creative practice T he day I visited the attic studio of director and designer Bill Mitchell, his partner Sue Hill warned me before I went upstairs that nothing was in a one-to-one relationship with a given production unless it was labeled as such. Rather, what I would be looking at is the collection of " things that helped him think " (interview with the author and site visit, July 30, 2018). I went up the stairs into the space of a consummate collector. The room was packed all the way up to the peaked rafters with odd objects that were only organized via what Hill called a " naïve Dewey system " of Mitchell's own making. For instance, assorted vintage boxes on the wall above the stairs bore labels that mixed the selfexplanatory and the unexpected: While the one labeled " teeth " contained what it promised (both real and fake), boxes like " hate " and " luck " organized a mixture of objects bound together by free association. The one labeled " hate " included poison-pen letters typed in an impossibly Tabletop Boxes of Blue and Conceptualizing The Portrait, Tree, and Deer for The Wild Bride. | Photographs courtesy of Skye Strauss, taken July 2018. 22 | THEATRE DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY | WINTER 2021