SILO STUDIO

About

Silo Studio - the design collaboration of Attua Aparicio and Oscar Wanless — unveil the outcomes of their most recent experiments with materials and techniques in an exhibition that opens during the London Design Festival (14 — 23 September). The results are playful, expressive artefacts that radically rethink how we relate to functional domestic objects and include items of furniture, tableware and lighting. Silo Studio's craft and design practice focuses on how industrial manufacturing processes might be adapted for small scale production and identifies the alternative possibilities this can open up. They call their approach ‘Handmade hi-tech'. Working as artists in residence at Jablite, the UK's largest producer of expanded polystyrene insulation products, they have continued to refine the textile moulding techniques they developed to form their signature material, NSEPS (Not So Expanded PolyStyrene). This involves steaming coloured polystyrene beads inside fabric moulds, causing the beads to expand and fuse together into an unusually dense but lightweight material, while picking up the detail of the stitch and grain of the textile. The patterned and muscular shapes that they create by these means cannot be achieved through the use of conventional industrial metal moulds and it gives rise to the surprising formal characteristics of their furniture (such as its tangled structures) as well as its distinctive pixelated patterns. Silo continue to experiment with the possibilities opened up by this method of making and in the range of innovative new designs shown here they have applied their textile moulding process to other materials to expand their repertoire. Attua Aparicio and Oscar Wanless formed the Silo Studio partnership while studying on the Design Products Course at the Royal College of Art (2009 — 2011). Coming from backgrounds in engineering and design, the core of Silo's work is to look at industrial processes and materials, bringing them into the studio to develop. By adopting a hands-on approach they aim to discover possibilities that the production line misses. Silo Studio were recently nominated in the furniture category of the Design Museum's 2012 Design Awards and took part in the exhibition Designs of the Year at the Museum in February. Marsden Woo Project Space is curated by Tessa Peters The Marsden Woo Project Space runs alongside our established programme of solo and small group exhibitions by gallery artists. MW Project Space allows us to respond quickly to significant bodies of innovative work and showcases the work of talented emerging artists and designers and fresh directions in the work of more established artists. The exhibitions are organized at short notice, so please check our website regularly for news on forthcoming shows and events.