Re-interpreting the original purpose of the crate, Studio Makkink & Bey engage our perceptions of what a product’s purpose is. These crates become domesticated containers, rich with material detail. They are wooden retreats used to seclude oneself from the outside world and when unfolded can become furnishings inside an already furnished room. The result plays with our ideas of value; the container is the content.

VacuumCleanerCrate wears a colourful skin of thread wrapped around each of the crate’s wooden slats. Resembling a traditional tea trolley, the piece is fitted with both a luxurious, silver coloured tea set and vacuum cleaner – one appliance a tool for work, the other an object that brings respite and refreshment from work.

ClockCrate performs a balancing act between leisure and work. At the centre is a clock pointing out whether its time to go to work or time to unwind. Signifying these two temporal domains are a leather work apron and pyjamas with plaid lining hanging on either end of the crate. The cork exterior of the crate works as a muffle to hide the ticking sounds of the clock, a counter-intuitive act allowing people to briefly forget about the time.

VanityCrate is a wash unit that provides compact bathing facilities with a water ewer, mirrors and brushes for personal grooming. The surface of the crate is flocked with a tactile, dark brown material that feels soft, like a towel or bathrobe. As with the ClockCrate, this piece folds in on itself to become a portable container.

Studio Makkink & Bey is a multi-disciplinary design practice that work across public space, product design, architecture, exhibition design and the applied arts. Established in 2002 and led by architect Rianne Makkink and designer Jurgen Bey, Studio Makkink and Bey use narrative, study and research in order to offer new perspectives, alternatives and creative solutions through critical design practice. Current exhibitions include ‘Industrious Artefacts, the evolution of crafts’ curated by Studio Makkink & Bey, Zuiderzee Museum, Enkhuizen, The Netherlands (2011). Recent solo projects include; Balancing Barn interior, Suffolk (2010) commissioned by Living Architecture, Silver Sugar Spoon Lichtenstein museum, Vienna (2010), WashHouse, Helmrinderknecht and Happy Families at KadE Amersfoot, The Netherlands (2010), Design Matters, Plus Design, Italy (2010).

Spring Projects was established in 2008 to showcase innovative contemporary art and design by internationally recognised artists and designers. Previous exhibitions include site-specific installations and solo projects by Mat Collishaw, Solve Sundsbo, Hussein Chalayan MBE to the collaborative project American Chateau by Jaime Hayon and Nienke Klunder.

Spring Projects Presents
Studio Makkink & Bey, The Crate Series
At Design Miami/Basel, Switzerland, Booth 0S8, Hall 5, Messeplatz

14 -18 JUNE 2011

For sales queries: gallery@springprojects.co.uk
For press enquiries: tracy.lemarquand@springstudios.com

Visit : http://springprojects-designbasel2011.tumblr.com to learn more…

Plastic Lemons showcases work that shares a fascination with the re-purposing of everyday materials. In their practice these contributing artists and designers collect, arrange, document and experiment upon the most prosaic of objects in order to create forms that challenge and explore the social significance and consequences of things. By creating incongruities between material, object and representation, they urge us to re-examine our current understanding of the objects that surround us in our lives.

A leading figure in ‘The New Sculpture’, Tony Cragg, since the early 1970s, has created sculpture from society’s synthetic debris.“ His early works in plastic established a vocabulary of materials, objects and images, using the floor and the wall as key elements of the grammar. His innovative use of urban and industrial waste was handled with an invention that opened up a new territory for a generation of sculptors, and which Cragg himself has called ‘the new nature’[…].”¹
Canoe is a precise floor arrangement of plastic watering cans, bottles, laundry baskets and cylindrical containers, in the shape of an archetypal watercraft. Its mass-produced components both retain their original concept and draw new narratives – the environmental consequences of the over-use of plastic, the result of which is most prevalent on the waterways and coastlines of the world.

British artist and designer Stuart Haygarth collects, compiles and catalogues the material detritus of our contemporary lives and re-purposes it as components in highly visual and tactile works of art. Haygarth sees his years of collecting and studying our unwanted possessions as an opportunity to investigate our social behaviour and habits. Items are sorted, graded and methodically stored by colour, material and subject over a period of hours, weeks and months. Once catalogued, the materials are painstakingly arranged on, within or around a core structure to create furniture; mirrors, lamps, tables. The abandoned and broken become covetable again. Spent black party poppers form a sculptural chandelier, Millennium (2004). Bric-a-brac glass vases and ornaments are fashionable again, precious artefacts displayed in a vitrine, Aladdin (2006).

Using found objects, fly-tip cast offs and anonymous industrial parts, London-based designers, Committee, create new, desirable objects “with a complex collision of colour and reference” of which they say, “the results can be viewed either as a postmodern grotesque or as a source of abstract, compositional beauty.”² Lost Twin Ornaments is a series of experimental sculptures that question the burgeoning aesthetic produced by digital technologies. Rather than using CAD as an opportunity to express a fluency in form, Committee sought to question CAD form making in general.

By harnessing their complete lack of 3D CAD software experience, they produced almost totally uncontrolled shapes that fused a pair of incongruous, simple objects together. “The resulting ornaments are visually compelling, yet aside from the calculating power of computers they are derived from simple, arbitrary objects and unskilled human intervention. It seems we are drawn to these complex forms but how should we judge their aesthetic language? They are to some degree, artless objects”³

British artist, Petros Chrisostomou’s photographs document a constructed reality, each a detailed still life that sits somewhere between fact and fiction. Chrisostomou builds intricate architectural models, based on tactile everyday spaces that become the stage for an installation of life-sized, ordinary objects, with a role reversal in scale between object and environment.

Wasted Youth (25 Ashbourne Avenue, Whetstone N20 0AL) (2008) is autobiographical, a kitchen reconstructed from memories of a childhood home; the eggs balance precariously on the kitchen’s surfaces signifiers themselves of a formative stage of life and development.

Galacta (2008) features a pair of vertiginous silver platform heels the connotations of which create an uneasy association in their new context, a reconstruction of a typical gallery space with its minimalist steel beams, roof lights and pristine white walls. This work references a language of contemporary “free standing” sculpture that cartoons our expectations of this genre. In Galacta and Wasted Youth, Petros combines, rearranges and manipulates our daily experience of objects into something new and unexpected, freely ignoring the distinction between high and low culture. Galacta probes at the social weight of the object, the contrast between object and context which pokes fun at the machinations of art world and of art as a commodity.

¹ Tate Collection, London. Published in Passports British Council Collection, British Council, London 2009
² Committee, 2009
³ Ibid

Opening times: Monday – Friday 8am – 6pm and by appointment. At Spring House, 10 Spring Place, London NW5 3BH
For sales enquiries: andree@springprojects.co.uk +44(0)20 7428 7159
For press enquiries: camilla.simpson@springstudios.com / tracy@springstudios.com +44(0)20 7267 8383