A few brief notes and highlights from the ongoing graduation exhibition at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm and namely from the '22 Product Design batch. The exhibition is on view through Friday May 24.
Rebecca Wiik, Recycle World, installation view from the graduate exhibition
Rebecca Wiik (@wiik_design), Recycle World
Rebecca project is problem-solving and solution design at its best; looking at the terribly overlooked functional site that is the Swedish garbage house; turning it visionary-style into a place of colours and sculptural forms that play with the conditions and structural orders inside. If an artist had been commissioned to do an artistic decoration of a garbage house by the Swedish Public Art Council it might have looked something like this. Making something unsexy look this good is an art itself. Also her on-site presentation was the opposite of the sort of boring demonstration of a project like this you might have come to expect. Someone ought to help her implement this into a reality on a trial basis with an actual residential construction project.
Rebecca Wiik, Recycle World, installation view from the graduate exhibition
Ida Simma (@idasimma_design), Pleat, presents as sound absorbing textile sculptures that beyond their utilitarian purpose more than just adequately stands tall and aerially as decorative objects for a public milieu or home. Interestingly brings thought also to the school’s Fashion programme.
Ida Simma, Pleat, installation view from the graduate exhibition
Fanny Axnér (@fannyaxner), Transit. Fanny has evidently come across as an exceptional design talent in the class. Her Transit is a table that translates the visual signifiers, architecture and the feel of urban sites for transport into a table, in contrast and reversing a design canon that brings the notion of home out into the public realm. The balance and choices are so well-calibrated; allowing for poetry and softness, where someone else would have gone down a route of too literal. Not a talent of such precision like her.
Fanny Axnér, Transit, installation view from the graduate exhibition
Tora Kirchmeier (@torakirchmeier), Sorgekant. This is an incredibly thought-provoking project found in the intersection between art, visual communication and design but also is a daring project in so far attempting to depart away from the ”core” of the Product Design programme, by lying closer to history narration per textile-based art. In a Swedish social context where a private realm is so very private and we lack adequate language to express mourning and the loss of the lives of our kins, or our condolences in the loss of others; Tora looks at how in the past envelopes embellished with a signifying black ”sorrow” border were sent to convey ”the message”. This black border becomes the focal point in a ”hyopthesis” that the notion of people in the past putting objects in and around a house to express loss (or wearing certain clothes for a certain period of time) constiutes an act that gradually diminished over time, without properly being substituted and thus leaving an awkward communication gap behind. Her installation consists of five everyday domestic objects fashioned with this previously customary black sorrow border.
Tora Kirchmeier, Sorgkant, installation view from the graduate exhibition
Siri Boekhout, Dygn, installation view from the graduate exhibition
Siri Boekhout (@siriboekhout), Dygn. Siri revisits the dated functional device that is considered the earliest known clock; the sundial, which reads time by the sun and shadow casted by the sun. The mere idea of revisiting the design of something that has been rendered ”useless” (note; quotation mark) is clever but what is ingenious is how Siri uses her background in architecture to allow for the sundial to become the axis of a live social communal resting site; one where to disconnect and alleviate a bit from our excessively time-controlled schedules. A conceptual social spot that in reality would attract if put into actual effect. Stellar and then some.
Siri Berkhout, Dygn, installation view from the graduate exhibition
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