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Burnt offering: Furniture reflects human frailty

By Lindsay D’Arcy 09 : 08 : 2012 Netherlands : Fire : Disease

Eindhoven, Netherlands – Saddened by his ailing grandmother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease, designer Tuomas Markunpoika Tolvanen has created Engineering Temporality, a furniture collection that aims to draw attention to the devastating effects that the illness has on a person’s memory.

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.

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