MDW | Industry

Presented by Isabel Avendaño Hazbún with Raven Mahon

Industry is an exhibition about legitimate sustainability with the aim of creating a circular economy model within a small designer–maker studio. The result is a series of speculative works — furniture, lighting, homewares, textiles and sculpture; some finished, some still concepts — where the entire ecological impact of the object is considered: materials, production, use, storage, transport and disposal, compelling a revision of outdated manufacturing models where sustainability becomes the true measure of an object’s worth.

Working mainly in timber and rubber from recycled tyre inner tubes, these objects are designed to be disassembled for reuse or repurposing, as well as storage and transport. Every timber build is a knock-down frame secured with dry joinery, rubber rope or pressurised rubber inserts, creating larger objects from smaller parts. This principle is also applied to the lights in the exhibition, made from discarded fluorescent tubes that can be disassembled by simply pulling a rubber knot. Even the LED strips are held with knotted rubber, anticipating reuse. Similarly, larger works can be dismantled, easily stored or later adapted into smaller forms.

The sawdust from these manufacturing processes is salvaged and treated, creating a material composite that can be moulded, coloured using natural dyes and later disposed of organically. The tyre inner tubes are collected and then transformed into rope and hand woven and knitted into textiles, applying rubber’s elastic properties and intrinsic friction to cover, protect and hold.

The idea for Industry originated from a desire to question harmful systemic design and production practices in the industries the artist works in that feed an unsustainable model for the future of our planet. Industry is the practical outcome of a year’s study into sustainable ancient, low-tech technologies long discarded in the name of ‘progress’ and which do not require any new infrastructure to be applied, a considerable advantage for a small designer–maker workshop. These works embody the thoughts and ideas that stemmed from this research.