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Every spring in South Korea’s Gyeonggi-do province, local workshops prepare for the Icheon Ceramic Festival. But the showcase of the area’s prized ceramics brings with it an unsightly after-effect: large mounds of substandard pieces discarded after the firing process, with cracks or other defects, known by locals as do-chong. For Haneul Kim — who hails from the nearby city of Yeoju — these ceramic graveyards have been the starting point of fresh creativity.
At last year’s festival, Kim debuted his eye-catching wabi-sabi (WB-SB) series of table lamps made from foraged ceramics fragments — “some delicate and thin, like teacups; others heavy and thick like bricks from old kilns”, he says. They were pieced together using the traditional Japanese craft of kintsugi. “Gold leaf is applied over lacquer joints, adding a sense of preciousness to these once-abandoned materials,” he says.
Kintsugi is increasingly common parlance in design circles, but a growing band of designers are taking on the “make do and mend” ethos, salvaging not only leftover ceramics but also stone and marble, and pressing them back into action as striking pieces of furniture.
Creative use of waste is a hot topic in terms of sustainability. In the UK, for example, the government plans to publish a new Circular Economy Strategy this autumn, looking at how waste can be minimised and materials recycled and reused across sectors such as construction and textiles. It’s a plan to “reduce the need for landfill and incineration”, says Steve Reed, environment secretary, but also to “help us cut carbon emissions, create new jobs and increase business profitability”.
Beirut-born architect Aline Asmar d’Amman uses offcuts of onyx or marble from her various building projects to create her Stone Cloud tables, available at Rossana Orlandi Gallery in Milan. At the family-owned stone workshop Laboratorio Morseletto in Vicenza, d’Amman hand draws organic shapes on the marble leftovers, which are then chiselled out to form the table top and grafted (nothing is glued) on to roughly hewn bases of Italian Vicenza stone.
Other designers are partnering directly with marble contractors to repurpose discarded offcuts. Tehran-born, Paris-based designer Payam Askari recreates the look of scraps piled in a bin by slowly pouring resin over overlapping pieces, casting it, then using a special saw to create a terrazzo-like effect.
In Amsterdam, Marte Mei reworks broken fragments supplied by stone company SolidNature into the Offcut Puzzle project. “We try to use the broken pieces as efficiently as possible so there’s no extra waste,” says Mei, whose jigsaw-like amalgamation of different coloured marbles creates a sleek surface for floors, walls and furniture — pieces that were presented at Paris design festival Matter and Shape earlier this year.
For d’Amman, this way of working chimes with her experience of growing up in Beirut in the 1980s and finding beauty in adversity. “You can buy everything in life except memory,” she says, “and these stones and fragments, pieces of earth, are so full of memories.”
German designer Carsten in der Elst believes the offcut stone slabs he uses to create his Graywacke Offcuts series of brutalist-inspired chairs and tables have as much of a story to tell as any marble you’d find in the Vatican. Which is why he strives to leave each piece unaltered — pebbly fossils and all.
Looking at the stone pieces as they lie on a pile waiting to be reimagined, “I ask myself: is this a backrest or a leg?” he says. “I won’t cut pieces to make it work.” He admits the rule is “a bit silly”, but he doesn’t see the point of cutting further into an offcut, thereby creating more waste. He stacks, rearranges, chamfers, then glues the pieces together in his studio. “If one piece doesn’t fit, I just take another,” he says. One maker’s waste is another maker’s treasure.
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