An Island Where Limestone Pretends To Grow: Floating World Present New Collection In Valletta
For one weekend only, the Floating World design collective is launching its latest collection of limestone home objects today.
‘An Island Where Limestone Pretends To Grow’ includes a collection of objects, including a cubby shelf, a set of bowls, a planter, a lamp, a chair and a side table, looking to the future while having their roots in our island’s past.
The two designers that make up Floating World, Matt and Suzi, were both attracted to limestone not only for its “golden hue and visual beauty but also for its archetypal significance”.
“We wanted to combine our experience in innovative design with our knowledge of materials to create a collection of functional home objects which span past and present by using a traditional material in a futuristic way,” Matt and Suzi said.
“This collection synthesises our material research with the experience of living on an island where limestone pretends to grow, and Floating World’s Limestone Home Objects are an ode to the land itself.”
The collection will be on display between Friday 27th May and Sunday 29th May at the Malta Society of Arts, 219 Republic Street in Valletta.
“From huge stone slabs at Hagar Qim to austere Medieval chapels and intricate Baroque cathedrals built by the knights, one can trace Malta’s history in limestone. It is the common thread that winds through the island’s architectonic past and forms the backdrop for daily life,” the exhibition description reads.
Floating World was interested in exploring the middle-ground between the manmade and the natural, the rectilinear and the curvilinear, the machine-cut quarry face and the windblown sea-shaped cliff face.
Synthesising their visual research with an understanding of the material itself Matt and Suzi identified limestone dust, which is a byproduct of the quarrying process, as having the potential to be reimagined.
Making use of their knowledge of casting, they developed a composite material that would allow for a diverse range of forms and applications while still retaining all the qualities of limestone that attracted them to the material in the first place.
The composite they developed allowed them to work limestone in new and unusual ways, shaping and rolling it like dough, forming it like clay, and even painting and pouring it on like plaster, thus resulting in the Limestone Home Objects Collection, which is made up of a cubby shelf, a set of bowls, a planter, a lamp, a chair and a side-table.
The collection will also be accompanied by a zine which details the project’s conceptual context, with the foreword written by Gabriel Zammit and featuring prints by Yana Fenech.
The project is also being supported by the Malta Society of Arts.
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