Matter of Stuff, a leading design and manufacturing consultancy, presented ‘A Second Life exhibition’ at sketch for London Design Festival 2019, showcasing a newly commissioned body of work made from a single raw material. Hosted by sketch, the iconic artist-conceived food and drinks destination in London’s Mayfair, the exhibition ran until November 7, 2019. PiM.studio Architects, Brodie Neill, Matteo Fogale + Emma Archer and Studio Furthermore transformed hundreds of wooden dowels used for the scenography of Matter of Stuff’s 2018 LDF exhibition into an array of experimental new works.

Instead of recycling the dowels through mulching, the gallery asked the designers to reinterpret, explore and experiment with the material to create new designs while maintaining some of the structural integrity of the original installation. The result is a resolute and ongoing statement about the infinite possibilities of sustainable design, upcycling and waste avoidance. Proceeds from the sale of the design pieces will be donated to charities protecting the Amazon Rainforests.

“By injecting new life into waste material to create varied and extraordinary sculptures for an iconic London venue, we want to make a statement that goes beyond the importance of sustainable design practices,” said Simona Auteri, Co-founder, Matter of Stuff. “Through four different iterations of reuse, we seek to redefine waste as a legitimate raw material with enormous potential for creative renewal.”

Imagining a dynamic, new spatial experience within the sketch entrance, RIBA award-winning architects PiM.studio Architects used pine dowels to create temporary walls. During Frieze London (October 3 – 6, 2019), artist Stephan Zimmerli gave the installation a playful new look by painting the dowels with a graphic pattern, which revealed itself as visitors walked through the exhibition.

Longstanding champion of upcycling waste into new material streams, Brodie Neill reused 422 dowels to create a sculptural bench – ‘Latitude’. Handcrafted in Brodie’s East London studio, ‘Latitude’ incorporated a lattice-like technique reminiscent of traditional Japanese bamboo constructions where linear elements are bound together to create seemingly simple scaffolding-like structures.

The linear element of the dowels is repeated into a crisscrossing maze, creating a web of rectangular voids where each cell has a golden section. The undulation on the underside of the bench brings Brodie’s signature aesthetic of refined sculptural simplicity to a work of contemporary design using innovative processes to repurpose an existing material.

Furniture designer Matteo and stylist and costume designer Emma took inspiration from traditional tailoring techniques and couture details while using the wooden dowels as both the base structure and the interior of a screen. Using left-over fabrics donated by Kvadrat, the ‘Papillon’ screen featured an organic shape made from repeated segments. Here, the dowels were used as structural elements hidden beneath the fabric while giving the material its pattern and shape.

When tasked with reusing the wooden dowels to create new designs, Studio Furthermore noted that experimentations with sawing, routing and planing created waste. The more the designers explored what to do with the dowels, the more sawdust they produced. In creating their piece, they were inspired by the natural world where there is no waste – all matter breaks down into smaller matter before seamlessly reorganizing into another form.

Studio Furthermore applied this principle to their designs, creating light sculptures from dowels dressed with a textured sawdust surface. The designers limited themselves to working only with leftover components and materials stored away in their studio from previous projects. In addition, a bespoke exhibition lighting design by SEAM complimented and enhanced the installation.

“For us, attention to detail and workmanship is the ethics of design,” added Sofia Steffenoni, Co-founder, Matter of Stuff. “Our mission is to decode the multiple narratives that exist between an object’s function and its feeling, its material and its craftsmanship, its empty and filled spaces, its physics and balance, its finish and its raw origins. We are interested in an object’s materiality.”