This article was published 13 years
Zona Ventosa at the Temporary Art Centre (TAC) was one of my favourite shows at Dutch Design Week. 12 exhibitions showed new designers from all over the world experimenting, taking risks and creating something new and exciting.
From top to bottom, I spotted:
- Fenna Oosterhoff‘s ceramic products (including buttons made from leftover clay) which she says are inspired by: “…the proportions, patterns and textures which occur in nature.”
- BRINK graduate Bilge Nur Saltik, with her OP-jects which create optical illusions as they move over pattern
- Amelia Desnoyes and her co-collaborators had taken a break from their day jobs to hack an X-Y plotter and make a batik drawing machine so they could experiment with print-making
- Elke Van Den Berg created these gorgeous bowls to test slip colours, but when friends started asking if they could buy them, she realised she was onto something.
- I was particularly impressed with four BA students from Plymouth University who were only given the opportunity to exhibit here three weeks before the show. They decided to create a working lab to demonstrate their research into how recycled car tyre pellets can be turned into useable materials for the design industry.
- Guillaume Neu-Rinaudo argues that we are affected by everything in our environment and so has set about redesigning the things we don’t see any more – these coffee pots are created in a series of ten, in which the pigment from each one affects the next.
- Meng Hsun Wu’s mirror is part of a series that slightly subverts traditional forms to make us question how we interact with them, and therefore what we want for ourselves, instead of following instructions set by others. That aside, I think it’s very beautiful.
- Finally, I loved David Derksen’s Oscillation Bowls, decorated with ink from a swinging pendulum above them. He says: “With gravity as the acting force, these bowls are painted by a pendulum revealing a hidden pattern that exists in nature.”
Overall a pretty inspiring show with a lot of guts and optimism!
Further reading for the especially geeky:
- out and about :: tent london
- out and about :: imprint
- out and about :: ldf13 at the v&a
- out and about :: god is in the detail
This article was published 13 years
