WASTED//BROKEN//GROWN is where I am serialising my most recent two books Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure (Ludion, 2020 – now sold out in book form) and Broken: Mending & Repair in a Throwaway World (Ludion, 2023) and where I will be publishing the final book in the trilogy, Grown: Design That Gives Back, but only with your support. Subscribe and upgrade to paid to get all three books delivered to your inbox, chapter by chapter, and to support me in writing the third book.
Soft Baroque is Nicholas Gardner (1988, Melbourne, Australia) and Saša Štucin (1984, Ljubljana, Slovenia), who met at London’s Royal College of Art in 2013. ‘Nicholas is the hands and I am the eyes,’ explains Štucin. Gardner, a furniture-maker, inherited his hand skills from his father’s love of DIY, pottery and cabinetry and his mother’s passion for all things textile. Štucin gets her visual arts leaning from her mother’s commitment to ‘order and function’, offset by her grandmother’s ‘eye for the wild and the beautiful’. With Štucin admitting to a predilection for drawing objects that wouldn’t hold together in real life, it’s a perfect pairing. ‘We bring different skills to the table, yet we are interested in the same ideas,’ she says.
Their Finger Tables came about in response to a brief from Modern Design Review editor and curator Laura Houseley for the 2017 edition of the exhibition Ready, Made, Go, for which London–based designer–makers were commissioned to make objects to be put into permanent use by the Ace Hotel in London’s Shoreditch. The project champions local sourcing and counters the disposable nature of many of the theoretical prototypes and temporary spaces created for design events such the London Design Festival – of which Ready Made Go was a part.
‘We should stop calling it “waste” and start viewing it as one material being transformed into another.’
‘There was a significant focus on recycled materials across Ready Made Go,’ says Štucin. ‘We partnered with Alusid to make the tables from a stone-like material comprising recycled ceramics and glass.’ The tables are named for their distinctive ‘finger joints’ – a detail more commonly found in carpentry – that are cut with water jets for a precise fit. ‘Transposing elements across disciplines and questioning the familiar is typical of our approach,’ explains Štucin.
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