The Full Grown Project
Intersecting the boundaries between Nature and Art, Science and Horticulture, Manufacture and Design. Designers Alice Munro and Gavin Munro join hands with our ancestors across the millennia.
They employ ancient techniques and the miracle of photosynthesis by reconfiguring harmful manufacture into bio-facture, integrating the artistic and romantic into the scientific, in order to reconsider the way we produce everyday objects. They have created carbon sculptures which are functional and beautiful objets d’art.
The designers reconsider the Agricultural Revolution and bypass the previous profligate commercial use of trees as a timber commodity (together with the attendant machinery and processing) to create each piece with a ‘carbon sink 3D printer’, creating a new sculpture form in the shape of a tree.
Each tree creates the material and forms the shape using the miracle of photosynthesis. With each species demonstrating its idiosyncrasies of growth, displaying for all some of the assumptions and lessons learned throughout an intricate and convoluted process.
This represents a paradigm shift in the previous egregious plundering of our world’s natural resources, transforming our relationship with nature, and creating everyday objects by employing the most subtle intervention with nature.
Additional information
Using ancient techniques combined with modern technology we grow, shape, graft, nurture then harvest the living trees into furniture and art.
Each piece is then dried carefully over a year and then planed and polished to an eminently touchable finish. Each piece is unique, epitomising elegant cooperation between nature and craftsmen that could last for hundreds of years.
Information submitted by the maker and edited by the Future Materials Bank.
Ingredients
Chlorophyll, wood
Credits
World Hope Forum - video talk and tour of the chair orchard, Louis Vuitton - 200th birthday celebrations