Twice Removed: One Object, Three texts And Fifteen Things

Twice Removed is a collection of 15 objects that imagine design as an act of looking rather than invention. Each is an interpretation of an original found object – a carved wooden bowl bought from eBay. This original thing was given to a design critic (Alice Rawsthorn), a curator (Catherine Ince) and an academic (Cat Rossi), each of whom produced a written description of the bowl. These descriptions were then passed to a group of five makers, each in turn producing a new physical object based on their interpretation of the given text, blind to the knowledge of the original object.

The process is based on the ancient Greek tradition of Ekphrasis, where a work of art was produced in another medium as a rhetorical exercise. Here this translation of object to text then back to object, where each iteration is a version of the other.

The project the explores the relationship between objects, description and perception. Which, it asks, is the ‘thing’? The original object? The description of that object? The object made from the description? Or perhaps all of the above?

Are ‘things’ the thing itself? Or are ‘things’ how we see them? Is the authorship of an object contained in the act of making, the act of looking, or in the object itself? Who is the author of design? The designer? The maker? The user?

Traditional ekphrasis was a rhetorical exercise. In this version description becomes generative: The description of a thing producing multiple and varied versions of itself.

Twice Removed shown at Etage Projects, Copenhagen as part of the exhibition XYZ, curated by Workshop for Potential Design along with Paul Elliman, Gemma Holt, Michael Marriott, Study O Portable and Peter Marigold