Conversation Piece

A couple of years ago I applied for a residency with edra. I didn't win it, unfortunately, but I did get shortlisted, and I really enjoyed the experience. You had to design a product for them. This is what I came up with. It's inspired by the Visconti film 'Conversation Piece' starring Burt Lancaster. Burt plays a kind of straight laced academic boffin type, insulated from the world in his gorgeous palazzo in Rome, filled with his old paintings and books. He gets confronted with contemporary life in the form of a countess and her family - the countess is played by Sylvana Magnano, and her lover is played by Helmut Berger. They move upstairs and start renovating in complete 1970 style, so you get this almost violent clash of styles.

My idea was to apply marbled paper patterns, as found in the end papers of old books to aluminium using a dye sublimation technique. They do a lot of paper marbling over in Tuscany near where the edra factory is, so I thought that was a good connection. On the other side of the aluminium would be some sort of 'modern' colour, lime green or fluoro yellow or something.

My great-aunt Kathy won this book. She was famous in the family for her brilliance and crankiness.

I made these little models and photographed them.

You buy the pieces individually and you can stack them however you like.




After I was shortlisted, I asked an industrial designer to do proper drawings of them. (Thank you James Burns)

They look pretty slick now. One of the judges said he was disappointed the final product wasn't wonky and sagging. He thought that was part of the design, but it was just my model making.

After the presentation, Massimo Morozzi, the creative director of edra said to me, "Don't change, you should keep doing everything exactly how you are doing it." I wasn't sure if he meant I should just keep doing art and forget about design, or whether he included designing as part of what I was doing. I tried emailing him for further advice but he never got back to me.