Accidental Collectors
8th February – 10th March 2007

The Aram Gallery was pleased to present Accidental Collectors, an exhibition of unexpected collected items by seven established designers and artists, which continues The Aram Gallery’s ongoing exploration into design thinking.

 

These collections were all a side activity of these advanced practitioners and serve as part of their inspirational sources. All the collections presented were of mundane utility objects that by being part of a collection have been dislocated from their intended use and turned into cultural products grouped for pleasure and observation.

 

In each collection, the variations expose the interest in ingenuity, inventiveness and resourcefulness. Each variant is further demonstration to the way design thinking solves the same problem in multiple ways. Another aspect these particular collectors share is an attraction to simple, iconic-type objects

 

The collections range from hand made oil lamps from India (Tony Hayward) to clothes pegs (Gad Charny, Yoav Ziv) aprons (Jessica Ogden) and bicycle puncture repair kits (Nigel Shafran). Two of the collections more directly in service of the design product, are the typographically-nuanced shapes and parts of objects (Paul Elliman) and the colour separated glass vessels trapped in light boxes (Stuart Haygarth). The latter two return to the stronghold of utility, although by this process they become more fixed and lose the characteristic of fixed yet growing entities.