Burnt offering: Furniture reflects human frailty

Using rings of tubular steel, Tolvanen covered pieces of furniture before setting them alight. The original furniture was reduced to ash and all that remains are the charred rings. The final piece appears to fade away, conveying the way Alzheimer’s patients slowly lose their memories.

‘My idea was to give an object a memory, create tension and stage a play between the perfect, anonymous, mass-produced structural material and the imperfections of the human body,’ explains Tolvanen. ‘The shell that is left caresses the vanished object, the memory of it, referring to the past.’

This burnt aesthetic is a great example of our Charred and Stained design direction.