Homebuildlife: Blanks In Between by Workshop For Potential Design

Roughed Out Soldiers by Peter Marigold

One of the most interesting exhibitions during the London Design Festival this month was Blanks In Between, a project by speculative design practice Workshop For Potential Design in which six designers considered negative space, unused potential, and the ideas that come from blankness.

Roughed Out Soldiers by Peter Marigold

Each designer created a very different interpretation. Peter Marigold presented Roughed Out Soldiers, an installation of toy soldiers moulded in silicone and then cast in plastic.

Roughed Out Soldiers by Peter Marigold

As the mould is cut away and recast over and over again, the form of the soldier becomes increasingly distorted, carrying the material of previous incarnations with it.

Blanks On Blanks by Gemma Holt

Gemma Holt's Blanks On Blanks is a series of geometric forms made from stacked paper. By cutting the shapes from everyday A4 sheets, Holt has made a series of paperweights that achieve almost the same effect as wood - the material they once were.

Blanks On Blanks by Gemma Holt

Study O Portable took the relationship between pairs of materials as their starting point. Hammer Shapes is a trio of hammers made from two materials that somehow connect to each other: carving wax is paired with casting bronze; marble combines with chisel steel, the metal that is used to sculpt marble; and type metal goes with maple pulpwood, just as it would in a letterpress machine.

Marble and chisel steel hammer by Study O Portable

Carving wax and casting bronze hammer; type metal and pulpwood hammer by Study O Portable

Keith Harrison's Wreath lighting installation responds to the history of the exhibition space, which is on the site of a Chinese restaurant.

The installation features 60W light bulbs, cast in porcelain slip and coated with Chinese Five Spice, so that as the bulbs heat up and eventually explode, the spice smell disperses into the space.

Wreath by Keith Harrison

The Volcano Project by Kieren Jones explores a potential manufacturing method: using volcanic explosions to 'cast' lava into objects and pieces of architecture, by creating moulds into which it could spread and set when it erupts.