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Furniture exhibited as part of group show, ARCO OKAY

Akram was invited with the OKAY collective (10 members), an organisation making high quality furniture utilising the twin principles of artisanal craftsmanship and sustainability but facing competition from cheaper 'flat-pack' alternatives to support the Arco company (based in Winterswijk, The Netherlands). The project was supported by PREMSELA (Platform for Dutch Design and Architecture) and The British Council to achieve outcomes that were not required to fulfil an immediate commercial purpose but rather to question the current methods of material processing and product typologies.

Faced with the question of how new ways of thinking about traditional materials could support a long established furniture company to use existing production facilities in new ways, Akram explored surface treatments. Akram’s exploration of treatments combined two traditional techniques, marquetry and veneering (a particular skill of the Arco company) in order to explore what she regards as an interesting paradox, the way in which the more skilled the hand of the craftsperson, the less apparent it is in the manufacturing process. Identifying that the 'luxury' production processes of the company resulted in a lot of waste she experimented using leftover veneers that were cut into discs, randomly laminated onto panels by scattering and compressing using layers of glue and lots of pressure before being sanded back to a flat surface to reveal an unpredictable pattern.

The experience directly informed Akram’s research, particularly in the context of new ways of thinking about Corian, the widely used acrylic polymer solid surface material made by DuPont. This resulted in her contribution to the Tron: Legacy/Corian furniture project sponsored by DuPont and the Disney Corporation and exhibited at the 2011 Milan Salon. Here, material possibilities first explored at Arco had outcomes that were informed by the visual vocabulary supplied by the film ‘Tron’.

www.flickr.com/photos/arco_contemporary_furniture/5780196587/

www.flickr.com/photos/arco_contemporary_furniture/5780742020/

www.designboom.com/design/tron-designs-corian/

www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=746471687665

jordicanudas.com/corian/