Expressive Products

From South Africa

Quirky, colourful and creative; the crafts at the Design Indaba expo often are very expressive. Crochet cacti, trash chandeliers and forbidden fruit lamps; South African designers are not scared of experimentation.

Tweak Traditional
Crochet takes crazy shape in the poufs created by Maymott; weird and colourful forms inspired by sea anemones and jelly fish. Other flora and fauna inspired crochet pieces were made by Peta Becker and margaret Woermann of The Curious Room; crochet cacti and insects popping out of a sofa. Monkeybiz makes funky beaded products. Craftscurator just loved their range of enlarged household items like a chili sauce bottle or soap cartons.

Tweak Trash
'Tranform Trash with Mister Nash' was the title for a Design Indaba workshop for kids, given by Heath Nash, South Africa's most influential designer working with recycled materials. He has been creating lamps out of waste plastic bottles, and keeps finding new ways to work with trash as a raw material. Magpie Studio, a collective of artists, also work with waste materials, and create stylish chandeliers out of that. Work from both studios is brought to Europe by Mariette de Haan, owner of gallery From Africa With Love.

Tweak Techniques
Small dollops of glaze decorate the surface of a range of ceramics lamps called Forbidden Fruit. Swedish design duo Glimpt worked with The Potter's Workshop and used the expressive glazing techniques to create the enlarged beads that the lamps are made of. At Ambiente Frankfurt, fair design importer Unseen Products launched the collection and put the lamps in the spotlight. Soon, we can see these expressive showpieces in shops around Europe.

Read more on South African inventive crafts and sensitive style, and on Design Indaba conference. Or read the article Craftscurator wrote for Stylink in Dutch.

design indaba, maymott, monkeybiz, heath nash, magpie, from africa with love, glimpt, the potter's workshop, unseen products