Surplus & Creativity: Design and the Readymade
Competition & Exhibition
In the 21st century products of every kind, shape and form are manufactured at unprecedented rates, filling our homes, offices, and storage spaces. Collectively, thousands of hours of human effort are vested in these products through materials extraction, research and development, design, manufacture, marketing and sales. When the lives of these products are over, they are dumped or discarded to storage.
These surplus 'things' still contain embedded value, untold stories, and the possibilities of different applications and life in a third age.
The competition brief was to recontextualise surplus or discarded objects and things to produce a new vision of use, understanding or comment.
The project aimed to attract entries infused with immediacy, action and creativity; to generate fun, humour, argument, and discussion; and to provide the opportunity to publicly exhibit and celebrate the best of our creative efforts.
Catalogue Introduction - Rodney Adank
The cyclical nature of beauty can be fickle and ruinous. In the 1970s Formica was sought after and desired; in the 1980s it went unnoticed; in the 1990s it was considered ugly and was ridiculed. In the post-millenium noughties it is to be stripped off the walls and put in the landfill.
This piece reinstates Formica’s beauty and desirability by using it as an embellishment on a garment made from discarded sofa covers and built around a draped roll. The addition of buttons injects colour into the piece.
Materials: Formica walls, discarded sofa covers and old buttons.
