WOOD by TEN
Dumper, Sam Johnson (photo: Hector Serrano)
WOOD, the collection produced by TEN and launched at last year’s 100% Design, is now on show at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow until 19 April.
TEN is a group of designers (Tomoko Azumi, Stephen Bretland, Carl Clerkin, Gitta Gschwendtner, Chris Jackson, Sam Johnson, Michael Marriott, Hector Serrano, Onkar Singh Kular and Nina Tolstrup) who for the last three years have got together to create products based on the shared ethos of responsible design. Previous years have seen them focus on the idea of sustainability, and last year’s collection, WOOD, moved this idea on from concepts to reality, creating a series of practical, affordable objects for the home made out of wood.
It’s this newest collection that’s currently on show at the William Morris Gallery, which is housed in the Victorian designer’s family home. The Gallery has a good collection of Morris designs, textiles and wallpapers which will provide an interesting foil to the work by TEN – although visually Morris’s work is very far from the functional minimalism of WOOD, the TEN designers share Morris’s belief in the importance of honesty and usefulness.
Objects on show include Nina Tolstrup’s deceptively simple bird feeder, which cleverly provides a frame to capture the moment the bird lands at the same time as a support for the food. Equally simple are Gitta Gschwendtner’s witty wooden door wedges in the shape of a car designed to appeal to children as well as adults. Look out also for Sam Johnson’s toy dumper truck which doubles both as a toy and a storage container when the toy has been outgrown.
The Crafts Council in collaboration with retailer twentytwentyone is touring the exhibition round the UK and details of future dates and venues can be found on this website.
www.craftscouncil.org.uk
