Danish ceramicist Morten Løbner Espersen is fascinated by the idea of the vessel. He is so fascinated about it that he turned this archetypical form into his object of choice, creating variation upon variation of clay vessels, going from more functional shapes or complex and abtract avant-garde constructions to more sumptuous designs or elegant spherical forms.
The peculiar thing about his vessels is the fact that Espersen doesn't add any special ornaments or decorative motifs on the surface of the vessels, but covers their surfaces in unique layers of colours.
This process of overlapping glazes forms a variety of intense nuances, producing an intriguing dynamic texture that looks as if it were made with some kind of flowing and bubbling liquid erupting from the vessel.
This polychrome chaotic maelstrom, unpredictable yet mesmerising, forms complex glazed surfaces that celebrate the power of materials and colours.
The casual, splattered palette resulting from this layered technique forms glossy and bright nuances and, while Espersen works with ceramics and glazed stoneware, there are other artists and designers working with very different materials and creating equally mesmerising colourful effects.
French design students Hugo Maupetit and Vivian Fischer came up for example with a project for collecting discarded chewing gum and turning it into plastic skateboard wheels that look as if they were made with melted coloured liquids.
In the past chewing gum was mainly made with natural gum like chicle, but nowadays it is made with a synthetic gum (polyisobutylene that is also used to create car tyres) with added preservatives, plasticisers, sweeteners, and colouring. This means that this plastic-based product is a non-biodegradable material abandoned in our environment and infiltrating oceans and food networks.
Disposing of discarded chewing gums has become a nightmare for many cities all over the world: removing these urban debris from pavements and streets is indeed extremely expensive for the local authorities.
The first step of this project consists in installing a gum collection board and Maupetit and Fischer did so as an experiment in Nantes, France. People leave stuck on the boards (that also act as a photo op for those ones who want to share images of their efforts at recycling...) their discarded gums that get cleaned, crushed, mixed with the board itself made from polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) plastic that stabilises the chewing gum as it is melted together. The resulting material is then coloured with natural dyes and injection-moulded to create skateboard wheels. The number of gums needed depends from the size and the hardness of the wheels.
The different substances in the melting and moulding processes will generate indeed three different grades of wheels - soft, medium, and hard - in different sizes. The recycling process is an example of closed-loop system since, when the wheels worn out, they can be recycled again - they can indeed be grounded and melted and reshaped into new wheels.
The students imagined this project could be carried out as a collaboration between companies such as streetwear brand Vans and Mentos gums (produced by confectionery company Perfetti Van Melle), and came up with a slogan for it, "Off the Street", inspired by Vans' "Off the Wall" slogan. According to the students (and who could disagree on this point), involving multinationals in such a project, may help them to understand how to reduce industrial waste.
The skateboard wheels would be an innovative method to clean up the streets of our cities, and while for the time being they are a student project, they look extremely fascinating for their maelstroms of bright and brilliant shades and for showing us that, yes, it is possible to design new and intriguing products from waste.
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