For this September’s London Design Festival 2023, I have collaborated with designer maker Blake Carlson Joshua. After meeting at the inaugural Material Matters Design show in 2022 where we were both exhibiting, we made a connection with our unconventional use of waste materials.
We made a plan to collaborate…
...a year on and that plan has come together through the co-creation of two benches.
The first bench extends the legacy of the waste paint from my Paint Drop project, only this time, as we had decided to work on a bench, the horizontal nature of the piece led me to drop and pour the paint from either side of the reclaimed Iroko, in order to balance the organic pattern and convergence of the waste paint with the handcrafted paper stones at either end.
Bridge Bench Multi Colour Series I - dimensions L 1860mm W 550mm H 460mm
Close up Bridge Bench I
Close up Joint: Paper/Wood/Paint
Bridge Bench Nude - dimensions L 1860mm W 550mm H 460mm
Blake and I were invited by Solid Floor earlier in the year to work with some of their offcuts and waste wood, as they are retailers and fitters of flooring. We chose some wood boards named Magma Etna and Blake also collected all of their office paper waste for the stones.
Blake’s Studio
Here, Solid Floor’s wood planks needed to be celebrated, so I chose to leave them in their original painted white and burnt finish, and rather than removing the groove of the second plank, I serendipitously filled it with a salvaged piece of brass that fitted like a glove. The paper stones have been moulded around salvaged fence posts and made by Blake here in his studio.
Re-create is an exhibition curated by Solid Floor for the London Design Festival, and Shoreditch Design Triangle. Many objects have been created from Solid Floor timbers by local designers. Solid Floor has been supplying and installing bespoke timber flooring for over twenty-five years. Acclaimed in equal measure for the variety and distinctiveness of its floors!
The exhibition’s objective is to make use of waste flooring material that would otherwise be thrown away, via new-designed objects that not only showcase the beauty of the different timber floors with their various textures and colours but also reveal the ingenuity of the designers themselves.
Bridge Bench Nude II
B.C. Joshua is London based (Minneapolis born) in his own words he likes exploring the material landscape in a hands-on way. His work aims to interrogate and question pre-conceived narratives using a material-based approach to the creation of objects. Frequently his work considers the resources around us challenging the notion of ‘waste’ by changing its context entirely.
Below in-progress images of the Bridge Bench multi coloured
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