BROOM

source: dezeen

Co-founder of homeware company All Lovely Stüff and furniture designer Carl Clerkin designed an assortment of fantastical assemblages made of everyday objects like brooms, buckets and bicycle wheels, modified and combined with a sense of humour for a solo exhibition called The Other Way

Objects include a basketball net fixed onto a skateboard, a one-legged table, a cover for a traffic cone, a small cupboard for storing your broom on the wall and a broom with tiny wheels.

“I usually design useful objects for the home,” said Clerkin. “Function is always the main driver, but I like the idea of the things that we live with having character and interacting beyond the physical.”

“I like the idea that a bucket can express an urge, or a broom can be more comfortable doing it the other way,” he added.

Clerkin has also built a wooden installation at the show for people who don’t have a loft in their home. People can climb up a wooden staircase, poke their head into a tiny attic and play with an electric train set that circles the space.

AboutCarl Clerkin

“My Mother in law had one of those Chesterfield foot stools, the ones with the Cabriolet legs, she also had a Staffordshire Bull terrier. I always saw them as being related, Cousins perhaps.”

Carl Clerkin’s work is geared towards strengthening connections between people, objects, places and spaces. His subject is often the ordinary.

A bucket, a broom, a walking stick, a shed, a traffic cone, or details borrowed from these are often used as leavers to unlock hidden narratives within the objects he makes.

The work is often understated and draws very much on the familiar or the universally accessible in order to provoke our collective memories, to encourage understanding.

Clerkin has worked as furniture designer since graduating from the RCA in 1998. His clients include The Design Council, The Department for Education, Habitat, Lloyd Loom, Worldwide Co and Peugeot. The work varies from designing home-ware and furniture to exhibition design and gallery seating, though for this exhibition he plans to show work of a slightly different nature.