The transformation of humble materials into things of beauty and value is a common theme among todays’ product designers, but Julia Lohmann takes it to extremes.
Intent on exploring the contradictions in our relationship to animals as sources of food and materials, she works with some of the basest and most banal materials – offal, off-cuts of leather and other waste products of the meat industry – with the aim of “giving value to leftovers”. From a distance, her Ruminant Bloom lights look exquisite, if surreal – each a subtly different shape, colour and degree of translucence. As soon as you realise that each “bloom” is made from tripe – a preserved sheep’s stomach – the piece takes on a different meaning and “triggers feelings oscillating between attraction and disgust”.
Like Lohmann’s cow benches, made in the shape of a cow’s torso and upholstered in a cow’s hide, her Ruminant Blooms also prompt us “to relive the childhood realisation that the piece of meat on one’s plate and the animal in the field are connected”.
Born in Hildsheim, Germany in 1977, Julia Lohmann became interested in design on childhood walks with her father when they collected abandoned objects and transformed them into strange creatures. After studying graphic design at the Surrey Institute, she enrolled on the design products course at the Royal College of Art, London. Polemical as her work is, everything she designs is intended to be useful – “I would hate to design something useless”. |
