Conglomerate Vases
A new collaborative work with Kyoko Hashimoto: ‘Conglomerate Vases’ first exhibited at A World We Don’t Want in 2021 curated by Friends & Associates for Melbourne Design Week, supported by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). I also wrote a catalogue essay (kindly labelled a manifesto by the curators) for the World We Don’t Want exhibition here. The vases were exhibited again at the inaugural Melbourne Design Fair as part of NGV Select in 2022.
The vases are created from PLA polymer waste collected from Sydney makerspaces. We bind this scrap material into a cylindrical shaped blank with an epoxy resin and then mill out the vase using a robotic mill.
There is no good way to create this kind of work – a thermoplastic polymer set inside a thermosetting polymer. The work is durable but can’t be recycled or biodegraded. And yet we made the work anyway to illustrate how it is inexpensive, legal and, for the most part, culturally acceptable to do so. How do sustainable choices compete against aesthetic desire, legality and convenience? Not well.
We collected the waste material from the floor of the robotic mill that shaped the vases and plan to use it, somehow. It’s sitting in plastic bags on a shelf in our garage. So the waste became literal and figurative baggage that will carry around until we implement a cathartic reuse in a future new work.
Single vase photos by us. Exhibition and detail photo by Kristoffer Paulsen.
Below is the exhibition text for the work.
In geology, a conglomerate is a kind of sedimentary rock containing particulate objects in a cementious binder, such as clay or silica. Such rocks are formal articulations of larger, unremitting processes of the earth; energetic forces that grind, melt, abrade and compress.
In business, a conglomerate is a kind of corporation made up of smaller independent, and sometimes unrelated businesses that operate for the benefit of the conglomerate meta-structure.
Business conglomerates have formal articulations too. These vases articulate the conglomerate of industrial waste-making machines. They bind waste materials together in a way that has been praised by design media as a sustainable ‘recycling’ practice. But the conglomeration is poorly conceived; it reuses waste but can’t be circularised again, tacitly condoning the generation of waste in the first place.
Why do we allow our materials to become so assorted that easiest thing to thing to do with it is mash it up to create more stuff? This is the world we don’t want – a world in which the accelerationist agenda for new products views existing materials and products as nothing more than food for the machine.
The broader socio-technological conglomerates of waste-making machines is bound and cemented by regulatory policies that privilege capital expansion, economic growth and extractivism; the processing and consumption of the earth. Within this framing, studio design practices are smaller particulate activities subsumed by conglomerate forces of production, operated not necessarily consciously or even willingly, but pressured by a smothering need for survival in a larger economic structure.
