Stockholm Design Week 2016: On location

Taking 150-year-old Dalsland Canal in southwest Sweden as a starting point, seven designers – undergraduate and graduate students from the university’s Wood Oriented Furniture Design programme – each selected a site-specific reference from the waterway to inform their final piece.

Matz Engdahl’s starting point for his monumental object Funt was a local church and paper mill. Engdahl aimed to honour the sacred location and the ‘unity, lifecycle, duty, economic support and therefore routines and rituals’ through his highly experimental making process. 

After digging a hole in the church grounds, Engdahl cast liquid jesmonite straight into the rubble, leaving it to harden. Once the jesmonite had solidified, a rough and crudely textured baptismal font was revealed. 

This investigatory process is reminiscent of our Eruptia design direction in which designers relinquish control over the look of their work.