concrete design
/ interior design, product design, construction
This project took 5 months to complete - from paper sketches to shooting it in the studio - and has been by far one of the most rewarding projects to date.
The brief was incredibly open-ended, and I decided to blend a Japanese art form called Kintsugi (which repairs broken objects with gold glue, thus highlighting the crack rather than concealing it) with cement and concrete design and construction. The result was a dinner-date scene for two.
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The idea behind this project deals with our conceptions of fragility and value/worth. Fine chine and porcelain are often valued higher than something more robust, because it's considered more aesthetically pleasing. My goal was turn this on its head, and give utility to design, and function to aesthetics by going to the other extreme and moulding a set of dinnerware on a table-top to match.
To emphasise this, I used the idea of Kintsugi, and intricately highlighted the robust and evident cracks in the concrete pieces I created.
The progress shots show some of the trial-and-error I went through to reach the final stages, as well as some of the other pieces I made but never included in the final presentation:
Getting off the computer, and taking one's design to something far dirtier, far more rustic, far more hands-on and physical, is an absolutely essential experience - at least for me, anyway. It reminds one of the physical limits, but also gives one new inspiration and ideas for blending the online with the offline.
The results were beyond anything I could have anticipated, and I am incredibly proud of this project.
Cuts, scars, scratches, bruises, and 60kg of concrete later, my idea has evolved into its own entity, and it lives on as a functional unit of my creative expression.