ABOUT

Wendy Plomp
concept designer

Wendy Plomp sees her work as illustrations come to life, a little like a 3D collage. There is great wit and lateral thinking in her work – from cardboard rugs to ceramic vases with secret messages inside, each design resonates with a charm and simplicity that belies the deep thought she has put into them. In some ways, she sees herself as a storyteller, inspired by the irony and drama of daily life, bringing together “the incompatible with the compatible which creates something fresh and unexpected,” she says. With a keen eye for observation about how people live, her idea for a cardboard rug – an ingenious concept of portability, sustainability and humour – came from thinking about how we define our personal, private space. “I noticed how people gave cardboard new functions – like to beg or sleep on, to draw on or use for hitch-hiking signs, even to break dance on, which gave me the idea to print the inside of a used box with a carpet pattern so that wherever you are, this carpet can be your temporary clean space, your home.” Her reinvention of simply daily materials, like wood, metal, recycled fabrics gives ordinary objects an extraordinary spin: she has used compressed sawdust for the top of her ‘pallet table’, into which round recesses for plates or square ones for books have been pressed, the boxy ‘Send a Chair’, made from recycled board, is both package and chair in one, and basic packing tape is transformed into sexy underwear. The ‘Cover Up Vase’, left plain on the outside, only reveals its hidden story (perhaps it is a confession or tale of unrequited love) on the inside via an x-ray scan. “Like an old Greek vase which tells us stories about the past, I wanted to give people a way to perpetuate their own stories for the future,” she says.

copy Fiona McCarthy

• wnd@wnd.nu • t: 0031(0)641555883