On a beautiful evening at the Sydney Opera House, London-based designers Martino Camper and Max Lamb sat down together for a chat as part of the series Artist to Artist. But first they had to make their own chairs.
Martino’s was a fairly simple affair – a timber stool onto which he attached the back, which was a piece of wood appropriated earlier from a dusty corner of the Opera House’s backstage.
Max’s chair was more complex – a kit of parts made from recycled plastic panels that had to be pieced together and screwed into place. A recent design for Potato Head, a Bali hotel, the chair’s plastic panels were taken from old jerry cans and bottle tops, made to a specific formula resulting in white specked with colourful grains.
And it took longer to make – at first we watched Max struggle, then Martino tried to help, but in the end, Max told Martino to sit down and we soon settled into a conversation with Martino sitting down on his chair and Max sitting on the ground, taking time to make his chair in an unhurried way. A natural position for him, he laughed.
The pair are designers but they are also makers at heart, each interested in unpicking the origins and materials of an object in pursuit of a better design.
They are also very close friends, having met at the Royal College of Art in the 1990s when Martino was Max’s tutor in the furniture studio (a golden era at the college, Max’s other teachers were Tom Dixon and Ron Arad). The relationship soon developed from one of student and tutor to a close affiliation, a friendship and now they both have London practices that they say run “parallel” or at least at the same time in the same city. They spend time together, share ideas and contacts, Martino is a great cook (says Max) and even has one of Max’s student pieces in storage – a white cloud-like chair carved from styrofoam as a student.
Another thing unites them – a design methodology that combines equal parts business, working with manufacturers to create design products, with a creativity and deep thinking associated with academia. This “thinking side” is also expressed in Martino’s publishing imprint Dent-De-Leone: it has published over 70 books since it was first launched.
And it’s a mix that has resulted in a huge range of different projects.
Martino Gamper spoke about being asked to design and chair and needing to work through the question of what a chair is first. This became his 100 Chairs in 100 Days project where he created one chair a day for 100 days using a range of materials, including many that were salvaged. Another more recent project Hookaloti is similarly questioning: what is a hook when nothing is on it? Both of these also became exhibitions and books.
Max’s experimentation with cardboard has a similar approach – questioning first, object second. Explaining that he has a lot of packages delivered, he decided that, instead of recycling his cardboard each week like everyone else, he would collect his cardboard. Soon he had a whole garage-full of the stuff and spent six months (amongst other projects) playing with the material, and flour and water, to make totally new furniture forms with what he describes as an “underdog material”. The result is the Box exhibition which features some chairs painted by his small son.
Another “underdog material” Max has worked with in detail is stone – the granite discarded at quarries in Cornwall, where he grew up, and also a new material made from marble rubble and dust. This terrazzo-like material made from small quantities of incredibly beautiful marble pieces has the effect of upgrading a material to something new and ultimately desirable.
The slideshow of images ticked through, and the pair chatted through their projects, each resonating with a quiet confidence and thoughtfulness. I have seen Martino Gamper described as a maverick, but he lacks the arrogance that usually goes with that descriptor. He, like Max, is just someone who thinks before he acts, and refuses to choose the most obvious path.
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