Mercado Design Days

Mercado Design Days asked us to do something we are not often asked to do: stand next to the work and explain it, in person, for hours. We brought the current chapter of Plasthetic.s (lighting, candle holders, frames, the small organizer) and arranged them so the room could be walked through rather than browsed.

The pieces sat on a long, low surface. Behind them, a single board with the name of each object and almost nothing else. We wanted visitors to read the work first, then the wall.

The best moments of the three days were the slow ones. A collector asking how the pigment goes into the epoxy, and how long it sits there before being lifted. An interior architect taking a photograph of a candle holder from below, because the underside is something we usually only see in the studio. A young designer asking about the moulds.

Each of those conversations is, in some shape, in the work we are making now.

Showing the work in a public room is also showing the studio. The samples, the small failures, the half-finished test pours we keep because they tell us something. We brought a small selection of those, too, and left them on a quieter shelf for anyone who wanted to look closer.

If the polished pieces are the catalogue, those samples are the table of contents.