Spilt Milk

As Dzine forays into the wonderful world of ceramics (check out pics of our ‘Anillo’ series designed by Victor Carrasco at www.facebook.com/Dzinestore), we are more and more inspired by the beauty of this living material.

Here are a few broken pieces that there is no point in crying over:

Combining porcelain and a local Israeli clay, Schlomit Bauman ‘double-cast’ pots and everyday objects and then sat back and watched the different shrinkage rates battle it out to create the ‘Ran-out’ collection.

Reiko Kaneko’s double heritage is apparent in this beautifully imperfect tea set. Indeed, the ‘Drip Tease’ collection is British teatime meets Japanese Wabi-sabi, and certainly makes spilling a whole lot more glamorous.

Drawing a deeper connection between old ladies and their ceramic objects, Tamsin Van Essen shows the beauty in disease in her ‘Medical Heirlooms’ series. Pots with rashes, third degree burns, eczema and other painful looking ailments populate this collection, which looks like it should come wrapped in gauze.

Xiaoli Wen used a silicone-sealed plaster cast system to mold discarded bottles, which are reshaped by being plunged into a waterfall while still curing and then used as a positive to create a mold.

The result is water’s revenge on the containers that shaped it for so long, in the form of a collection of distorted porcelain bottles.  

Another tea set, this time created by making molds from fabric prototypes.

Alice, by Rachel Boxnboim, has the soft but sharp characteristics Andre Breton dialogue:

Paul: “I love you”

Valentine: “A cloud of milk in a cup of tea”

Although they look a bit like they were burnt in the oven like a batch of cookies, these vessels by Fumiaki Goto are fired partly submerged in charcoal which turns the pointy bit (deprived of oxygen) into a pencil lead. 

Crudely carving bowls and mugs out of a lump of plaster, Max Lamb created a crockery collection, slip-cast by Staffordshire ceramics company 1882 Ltd. (check out photos of the factory in the second printed issue of ‘Handful of Salt’). Perfect for the modern-day Betty Rubble! 

Inspired by the story of a Tea set left in ruins which started to grow flowers after birds dropped seeds inside, ‘100 years after the party’ by Makiko Nakamura tells the tale of ceramics which become more beautiful after breaking and sprouting new life.

by Claire Toussaint

Design at the Beach

After a long winter, we’ve had enough of shawl collars and hot cocoa and are ready to skip to the bikini and pina colada part of the year; here are a couple excuses to get down to the beach.

 The ‘Sea chair’, by Studio Swine, is made by collecting discarded plastic on the beach which is melted in a portable furnace (developed by Studio Swine and Kieran Jones) and cast onsite.

 A great way to clean up the beach, and spruce up your cabana! 

Open Source Sea Chair from Studio Swine on Vimeo.

Taking sand-casting back to the source, Max Lamb shows us how to make pewter stools on the seashore, with pretty convincing results.

If you want to bring home a little piece of the beach with you, Bold Design has come up with a way to make little sculptures of the surrounding landscape with sand, using bacteria (the good kind).

The lovely pink bacterial solution hardens the sand placed in a mold in your shape of choice (between an English, French or Thai rock formation).

Modeled on a game played in Japanese temples, ‘Sand’ by Yukihiro Kaneuchi could inspire a more sophisticated sand castle, for adults who still enjoy this beloved summertime activity.  

by Claire Toussaint

Conjoined (the party)

It looks like designers have been hanging out in the weirdest part of the natural history museum lately. Interesting creatures are coming out of our favorite studios, in pairs attached at the hip, head or back.

When a stool and a chair come together to create a bench/table, you have Established and Son’s ‘Table-bench-chair’. A multi-functional piece where the parts that went into it are easily identifiable, the ‘Table-bench-chair’ could potentially be surgically separated but not without each piece losing a little bit of themselves. 

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Jurgen Bey’s Kokon series wraps existing furniture pieces together in a PVC skin, a novel approach to the ‘reuse’ part of ‘reduce-reuse-recycle’. This process gives the final piece a bit of an uncomfortable feeling, similar to having your leg trapped in a potato sac with someone else’s, or wearing long-johns made for two.

Christopher Kurtz’s ‘Typical Windsor Form’ is one of those freaks of nature that is strangely able to survive and thrive in the wilderness although it clearly shouldn't be able to hold itself upright.

The ‘Cinderella’ table by Jeroen Verhoeven is a computer generated form, using a loft tool between two outlines of traditional furniture pieces.It reads a bit like the furniture equivalent of digitally morphing two faces together to see what their offspring might look like.

Incidentally, this is what Louis XV and Louis XVI’s baby would look like:

(Pretty similar to either one, but then again they’re related)

A student experiment for Baccarat led to this double stemmed glass. One could imagine a pretty humorous seesaw scene between two drunks drinking out of the same vessel. (If only Laurel and Hardy were still around!)

Ingo Maurer must have gotten in touch with his engineering side to create this ‘Floating Table’for Established and Sons, as it is a model of efficiency. It’s true when you think about it: why should a table have legs? It’s just a waste of material and space.

A different kind of circus act, the ‘Oneness’ extendable furniture system by Kyuhyung Cho and Hironori Tsukue is reminiscent of the ‘Flying Brothers of (insert homeland here)’. This acrobatic chair creates quite the sculptural element.

by Claire Toussaint 

Unidentified Design Objects

‘That’s great! ... What is it?’ is a phrase that comes up a lot when scrolling through beautiful design blogs in search of the newest, coolest products.  Is it a bird? Is it a plane? On a white background, completely taken out of context, designs can take on a whole new meaning in the reader’s imagination.

Here are a few examples to ponder on... (Answers at the end of the blog)

Designed by Judith Jacobi (student at Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule), this structure could be a fancy bird house/bath, a planter with pole for tomato vines, or convenient place to put your sticks.

‘Fanions’ by Dimitri Bahler, Linn Kandel and Ismael Studer: Street art? Panic button? 

‘Cuts’ by Philippe Nigro looks like a desk organizer or a cake stand. Of course, it’s pretty impossible to guess scale from this picture... Maybe an outdoor structure?  

Here’s an interesting looking object: ‘Spike’ by Alexander Lervik. This could be a knife holder, a file organizer, a holder for matches of all different lengths? Ooh, or a dish rack!

‘Scout’, by sandbox industries, is a series of boxes in all different sizes. This could indicate a series of kitchen containers, or possibly some kind of set of technological accessories to accompany your TV? The mystery shall remain until the end of this post.

Not sure why this odd bike rack ended up in the middle of a field... Maybe it’s one of Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculptures.  

Ready-made for the ‘freak-of-nature’ part of the Museum of Natural History? These strange growths swimming in a vat of formaldehyde could be anything from a glob of mercury to double-headed cow embryo (in the most appealing way possible). Looks more like a Damien Hirst than a Jean-Marie Massaud..

‘Nekton’ by Zaha Hadid is a collection of four organic, white, non-symmetrical objects. Possibly hearing aids adapted to different people’s ears? Braces for awkward muscle sprains? Ergonomic neck(ton) pillows? 

Another organic shape for the ‘Saruyama’ by Moroso; this time I’m going with a place to put keys, marbles, paperclips and other random hair accessories. Could also be some kind of embarrassing medical device. 

‘Snug’ by Kumeko: definitely a laundry bag. Or a place to store blankets or socks (depending on the scale). 

Oh, okay... it was a:

Place for guests to put their clothes and other belongings! 

A rug! 

A coffee table! 

A chair! 

A home security system!

 A chair!

 A vase!

A bench! 

A sofa! 

An Armchair! 

by Claire Toussaint