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what: Sotheby's, the prestigious auction house, has officially promoted waste as an honourable material for creating glamorous design. Furthering its incontrovertible fame in pointing out the official market value of aesthetic trends, the London seat opened the 2003 Contemporary Decorative Arts and Design selling exhibition, an exciting annual event showcasing the very best of contemporary craft and design, with a complementary special exhibition: “Waste to Taste”.
who: curated by Janice Blackburn, the show featured the work of more than 50 established and up-and-coming designers focusing on work made from recycled materials. Exploring the role of trend-setting designers in recuperating waste materials, the exhibition focused on the transformation of mundane ‘waste’ objects into consumer-friendly items, thus promoting a different consciousness of articles that people might otherwise choose to discard.
“The exhibition is an original way of addressing the very serious issue of how to deal with the growing and frightening amount of waste we generate, in a lively, creative and innovative way. The potential for re-interpretation and re-invention has been an exciting and stimulating challenge to the artists. Recycling what we no longer have use for and transforming it from waste to something of taste, is the ultimate ugly duckling story! ", explained Janice Blackburn.
from waste to taste: gold sprayed coffee filter bags used to fashion out an evening suit (Nathalie Hambro); dull every-day bottles transformed into modern, sensuous Baroque chandeliers and candelabras (Deborah Thomas); a selection of quirky lamps from an eclectic medley of domestic cast-offs, such as cocktail shakers, colanders and old machine parts (Miguel Gonzalez); salvaged antique fabrics, such as kilims and tapestry fragments combined with rubberised plastic to make stunning rugs and runners (Luisa Cevese); old embroidered tea towels and decorative scraps of material becoming frames for gorgeous mirrors (Jenny King). Other designers prefer to search for values in rejected items: quirky furniture is made through combinations of discarded furniture and objects, reinvented to form the furniture of tomorrow (Martino Gamper and Rainer Spehl)…
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