Maarten De Ceulaer | Mutation Series

in Furniture by editor — 6:28 pm | April 21, 20120 comments

The pieces in this series look like they weren’t made by hands, but have grown to their present form organically. They might be the result of some cell-transformation or mutation, or a chemical or nuclear reaction. Are they perhaps a virus or bacteria that has grown dramatically out of scale? The Mutation pieces make you look at furniture in a different way. They could be regarded as living organisms that can be cultivated in a furniture-farm, as a new-bred or extra-terrestrial species that have just been discovered.

On the other hand, this project can be seen as a review of classic furniture upholstery, they remind us of the famous and iconic deep buttoned Chesterfield sofa’s, interpreted in a highly contemporary and sculptural way. It’s an industrial process reinvented, a new type of craft. The pieces are created by carefully composing patterns with cut-offs of foam sphere’s of various sizes, and applying them onto a structure.

In the end the entire piece gets coated, with a durable rubber or a more tactile velvet-like finish. It is hardly impossible to ever recreate such a specific pattern, so every piece is completely unique, even when starting from the same basic structure.