HEARTACHE THAT ENDURES
A sculpture at Venice Design serves as a unique monument to loss
Oxidised iron plates assembled into a heart sculpture, a design work called Freezing The Hearts, stands out amid multiform and multifunction objects on display at Venice Design 2017. Peek at it from any angle and, still you won’t find a secret cabinet door or hidden compartment. The heart structure is simply there to feast your eyes on its motifs, created through the metal’s reaction to chemical elements.
With its lack of apparent function, Freezing The Hearts perplexes as much as it raises core questions on the practice of design — especially when exhibited alongside a myriad of visually stunning or humorous creations by international designers, nearly all of which serve as furniture, light systems, jewellery or functional show pieces.
“On one hand, designers in line with a traditional vision on design are attached to usage and function,” says curator Nina Dorigo. “On the other hand, others use the act of designing as a communicative tool.”
Thus, in the Venice Design exhibition
(which takes place at the same time and in the same place as the prestigious Venice Biennale, but isn’t connected to it), two categories of design works face off. The latter is comprised of creations, which, regardless of their shape, gain value from being holders of ideas.
As she attempt to question and challenge the definition of design, Dorigo’s argument sets the stage for a larger debate on the distinction between art and design, just as the frontier between both becomes increasingly blurred.
Freezing The Hearts conveys a caring, poetic, message to the world, argues Sasivimol Sinthawanarong, a design principal in her husband’s interior and architecture design firm Jarken.
Corroded by rust, the metallic heart sees its surface transform, mimicking the alterations that a human heart suffers when confronted with violence in everyday situations and through tragic world events. The idea behind the oxidised plaques came from Jarken designers’ appreciation of the unused metal pieces they commonly saw on construction sites.
“When redesigning spaces, we must do a lot of tearing out,” Sasivimol says. “Several metal plaques and bars were left lying outdoors and we noticed that their colour and texture began to change due to exposure to the Sun, rain and wind.”
Sasivimol and her team then brought the pieces back to their studio and began experimenting with chemicals, colours and acids that could re-create corrosion.
Although they had no control over the oxidation process, once designers reached a satisfying result in terms of colour, motifs and texture, they “froze” it by coating the metal plaques with resin.
“Freezing The Hearts is really about freezing the heartbreak,” Sasivimol adds, in a plea for mankind to stop self-destructing. The technique is no novelty. But the idea of turning old metal pieces into unique design elements has evidently piqued the interest of clients.
Freezing The Moment, a single plaque, also by Jarken, found itself on display at the Singapore Design Week in March. It constituted the basis for the heart-shaped sculpture Sasivimol was to create for Venice Design, as she answered the curator’s calls for design works relevant to the theme of “time, space and existence”.
But as Freezing The Moment opens up a realm of possibilities in terms of design and further development, Freezing The Hearts — a finished object — is hard to make sense of.
As a design work, it doesn’t showcase the innovative, ingenious or surprising elements one would expect. As a sculpture or art piece, it is timid and clichéd.