Welcome to our Design Digest series, where each month we share some mega cool design projects we’ve come across. Prepare yourself for less talk from us and loads of beautiful images to ogle.
Assemble | Encaustic Tiles
Granby Workshop, the social enterprise set up by Turner Prize-winning architecture collective Assemble, launched their range of vibrantly colored encaustic tiles at London Design Festival, Dezeen reports.
They are produced using the traditional encaustic method, a process where colours and patterns are not surface-applied, but are instead formed from the colouring of the clay itself. This means that the designs do not fade as they wear.
Read more about this collection here.
Sam Baron + Yatzer | Mateus
French award-winning designer Sam Baron has teamed us with Yatzer‘s founder and creative director Costas Voyatzis, to create this tableware collection marking Mateus’ 25th anniversary.
[The] collection is a testament to Mateus’ passion for one of the world’s oldest art forms as well as the brand’s history of creative collaborations with talented international artists and designers.
Read and see more here.
Photos by Fabian Björnstjerna
Noé Duchaufour Lawrance | Caractere
Noé Duchaufour Lawrance designed this minimalist tableware collection with Revol to celebrate the historic French porcelain house’s 250th anniversary. Launched during Maison & Objet in September, Trendland reports the following:
Caractere is an inviting dining set designed with a palette of warm colors, stripped of any excessive embellishments, and with names inspired by spices. It was born from a charcoal line moving freely on paper, as a drawing, where the line describes the movements of a hand gesture, imperfect and at times disobedient.
The sketches were then translated into beautiful three-dimensional objects, keeping the irregular contours of the outline faithful to the original concept. The imperfections add character to the pieces, and perfectly resonate in the fragile equilibrium between the living ceramic material and the manufacturing, giving the pieces a strong physical presence.
Read and see more at the designer’s website and here.
Michele de Lucchi + Alessi | Plissé
Marrying architecture, design and fashion, Italian designer Michele de Lucchi has created the Plissé kettle for iconic Italian design brand Alessi. As DesignBoom reports, the kettle isn’t made from clay, but rather, thermoplastic resin. De Lucchi, describing his artistic process, tells DesignBoom the kettle’s genesis began with a folded sheet of paper, giving from to the shape and volume as “the folds transform simple two-dimensional sheets into three-dimensional objects.”
“The ‘Plissé’ kettle’s shape is defined by its folds, a technique that is quite old but still very much in use today with the skillful and creative use of pleating, fashion designers shape fabrics and create clothes like sculptural works of art.”
Read more from DesignBoom here.
Sylvie Godel | Piles
Swiss artist Sylvia Godel‘s new collection gives the appearance of stacked bowls, but closer inspection reveals they are a single volume of slip-cast porcelain. As DesignMilk writes, Godel drew inspiration from the stacks of discarded bowls she noticed during an artist residency in Jingdezhen, China.
That led Godel to begin collecting them, and with additional plates purchased, she made stacks to create plaster molds to slipcast. The finished bone china vases, called Piles, give nod to the city’s tradition of producing porcelain art, while also honoring the bowl as an archetypal object that dates back to the beginning of civilization.
Photos by Christiane Nill
Pierre Charrié | Whistling Jug
French designer Pierre Charrié has reimagined traditional Peruvian singing vessels with his new collection of colored musical jugs. Dezeen writes Charrié draws a lot of his inspiration from his fascination with ritual objects.
The ceramic Pan whistling carafe is a reinterpretation of pre-Columbian ceramic vessels found in Peru. These were used as ceremonial tools to produce sounds for healing purposes or to invoke spirits.
Read more from Dezeen here.
Love or loathe this new Design Digest segment from the world of contemporary ceramic art and contemporary ceramics? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!
As a maker and designer of ceramics I am loving this section.
Nice job