We have followed throughout the years on this site the developments of Mindcraft, the showcase organised by Danish Crafts, an institution of the Danish Ministry of Culture, that usually takes place during Milan Design Week. Fans of this event will be happy to know that the Danish Arts Foundation will present the new Danish Crafts Collection at the fair Maison & Objet in Paris (4th- 8th September 2015).
This year the Committee for Crafts and Design Project Funding picked five designers and makers using two keywords – craftsmanship and smart consumption – as the main criteria. Each designer will present hand-crafted innovative ideas based on recycled materials or on natural resources and made with production methods that may show a new path for our future.
There are two furniture makers, a ceramist and two textile artists among the selected craftspeople. Architect and designer Amanda Betz is interested in scale and light and, after mastering the origami technique, she came up with a series of folded paper lamps that combined Nordic minimalism and functionalism with Oriental exoticism.
For the Danish Crafts Collection, she replaced the paper with brass and created a trio of lamps called "Column", a name that celebrates her architectural background. The lamps – characterised by an intricate filigree pattern – help creating a sort of miniature urban space in a domestic environment.
Ceramist Anne Tophøj has developed new production methods that lie somewhere between artisanal techniques and serial production to discover new hybrid paths. Her tableware collection, dubbed "Geoplex", consists in four pieces – a medium-sized bowl, a larger, open plate/bowl, a small bowl and a rectangular platter – all shaped by four different features – form, production technique, material and colour.
The pieces are cleverly named after their individual production method: "Cut", "Press", "Flung" and "Turn". The hybrid process to make the pieces implies the use of industrial tools such as the jolleying machine, and in this way the designer merges craft with industrial techniques, preserving her skills and the local jobs.
Sustainable solutions characterise Jonas Edvard's tables, which feature a tabletop made of the natural composite gesso. Edvard is inspired by the form and function principle, but he is even more fascinated by materials and by the possibilities offered when you let a material speak. Coming up with his own principle – "Form Follows Materials" – he employed for his "Gesso Project" side tables a natural resource, limestone, in an experimental process aimed at creating durable materials which can be used for recyclable furniture.
His tables feature indeed a simple black-painted frame in recyclable steel and a tabletop made of limestone, gypsum and glue. All these components are bio-degradable, and the processing method Edvard devised means that he has come up with a material that can be poured, dried, heated and pressed before being moulded into specific products.
Fashion and textile fans won't be disappointed by the exciting projects included in the showcase.
A graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, textile artist and fashion designer Laura Barüel uses nature as a source of inspiration for clothing collections, stage design, costumes, exhibitions and other products.
In Paris she will be presenting four products – wallpaper, bedlinen, a cushion and a kimono – based on a pattern inspired by botany and a trip to Finland during which she reconnected with nature while walking around the local woods.
Moving from the work of Norwegian architecture professor Christian Norberg-Schultz, who explored the concept of genius loci, the notion that different places have different moods that affect us, and from Nordic artists such as Marie Gudme Leth, Josef Frank and Harald Solberg, Barüel created a unique pattern.
This one-off design is indeed made of plant images printed by hand in colours based on the original source and then transferred to a computer. The result has a poetic consistency, with oversized ferns, harebells, anemones, wood sorrel, mosses, mushrooms and maple creating light images on ethereal garments.
Martine Myrup managed to combine her training as a sculptor and artist at the Glasgow School of Art, with her passion for upcycling materials and used textiles. While living in Canada she inherited a large collection of porcelain from Denmark, and started thinking about recreating ceramic vessels in a material that could travel.
Further experiments led her to the creation of a ceramic archetype – a urn – made with white textiles that she hand-dyes, and other objects made from surplus fabric from industrial production and tablecloths, dresses and bed linen.
In Paris she will present the urns "Speckled Blue" and "Speckled Red" (#01 & #02): seen from a distance the vessels look like white urns covered in Jackson Pollock-like splashes of colours (though the blue designs also evoke beautiful Royal Copenhagen ceramics), but, at a closer inspection, the urns surprisingly reveal themselves as made of patchworked textile pieces.The result is ingeniously clever and surreal as well since the designer uses low-status materials such as recycled textiles for one-off objects of art. 
Rethinking the agenda, looking at nature to experiment and develop new materials, recycling and combining traditional and industrial projects while showing new directions for craft, craftsmanship and smart consumption is at the core of the projects of these five designers.
It's time the fashion industry opened up to such creative minds and started learning from such showcases to genuinely built a sustainable future by discovering new experimental fibres and innovative ways to recycle and reuse materials.
All images in this post © Copyright Danish Crafts.
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