Gallery FUMI loves to surprise with new innovative furniture where designers cleverly used science and art to transform unexpected materials such as glass, lead or expanded polystyrene into something new and perhaps apparently impossible, like contemporary seats, tables, lights and benches.
French designer Thomas Lemut has created solidity from transparency with GLASS MEKANO in which glass strips are held together with mechanical fixings, a little like traditional woodwork, without welding or gluing, to create furniture and lighting, in conjunction with Yvon Goude of Goude Glass, a factory based in the north of France (after six months of collaborative research and collaboration, and no doubt a few disasters and a few bottles of good French wine along the way).
Here at Gallery FUMI are the results, with a mirror, lights, table and bench, strong enough to stand on.
Downstairs the theme continues, in particular with the collaborative JAMESPLUMB whose flowing leadwork cascades over furniture and embraces lighting while looking as delicate as paper and Max Lamb who takes aluminium and expanded polystyrene into new dimensions with his furniture which moves from being light and geometric at one moment and to being heavy and ponderous the next.
A key question – is this furniture or is it art, or is it both?