Mus­ings on Semi-Permanent, vol. 1.

The dust gen­er­ated by the hooves of an inspiration-hungry horde is now well-settled on the tun­dra — but there's always time for some well-considered reflec­tion. In this series of reviews, Auckland-based designer Emma Par­nell shares her thoughts on Semi-Permanent 2010. First up, Ger­man 'object' designer Kat­rin Sonnleit­ner.

Kat­rin Sonnleit­ner finds ways to make the mundane seem inter­est­ing again, she takes ordin­ary objects and shows them in a new light; she believes “small changes in an object that’s every­day can bring it back into a per­sons per­cep­tion.” Sonnleit­ner enjoys the unex­pec­ted and for fifty minutes so did I. I had never heard of Sonnleit­ner before Semi-Permanent, she walked out with her cue cards look­ing the most nervous of all the speak­ers, per­haps not sur­pris­ingly with Eng­lish being her second lan­guage, but she quickly won the audi­ence over with her amus­ing obser­va­tions and interpretations.

Sonnleitner’s work circles around vari­ous themes. She enjoys habits in human beha­viour, rituals and tra­di­tions. She often merges famil­iar objects or changes them in an unex­pec­ted way to make some­thing new. She has cre­ated write­able por­cel­ain, draw­ers that move through walls and the infam­ous ‘broom-scythe’. Por­cel­ain and draw­ers are every­day objects we take for gran­ted but Sonnleit­ner has rein­ven­ted them and made us inter­act with them in a dif­fer­ent way cre­at­ing a whole new exper­i­ence around an object.

One piece which stood out for me was based around the idea that when we wear an item of cloth­ing once, we don’t want to put it in the laun­dry, equally we don’t want to put it back in the ward­robe, so where does it go? Sonnleit­ner has the answer, an object that com­bines the two, a ward­robe door on the front and a laun­dry bag on the back. Would I buy this? Prob­ably not, but it’s based on a human obser­va­tion that people are famil­iar with and this makes a con­nec­tion with people. Sonnleitner’s work is gen­er­ally very con­cep­tual, which is what I loved about it: there is real thought and insight behind each piece. She brings to the sur­face obser­va­tions that are already there and ready to be made and people con­nect with them in a sim­ilar way they con­nect with, for example, obser­va­tional humour. So is her work art?

Sonnleit­ner doesn’t really believe in the mass mar­ket­ing of products as it often involves com­prom­ising on cre­ativ­ity, “it’s like los­ing a baby” she says. She has only designed one product that has made it to mass pro­duc­tion, the ‘Puzzle Persian’.

You can buy as many or as few pieces as you like and when the small jig­saw puzzles are assembled they make Per­sian rug pat­terns made from dur­able floor­ing mater­ial. An every­day object has become some­thing new, the dif­fer­ence this time being the high level of inter­ac­tion mak­ing it some­thing people want to be involved in, hence the mass-market appeal.

Sonnleit­ner’ s work does seem to straddle the ever-debated bound­ary of art and design but I think one of the main themes to come out of this year’s Semi-Permanent was that of col­lab­or­a­tion, and the fact that we no longer need to put people into boxes. It’s time to stop arguing over ‘what is art’ and just appre­ci­ate whatever mani­fest­a­tion cre­ativ­ity takes — and with Sonnleit­ner you should always expect the unex­pec­ted. Every­one loves the under­dog, and in the com­pany she kept in this year’s line up Sonnleit­ner could be con­sidered as such, but in my opin­ion she gave one of the best present­a­tions of the week­end, the per­fect com­bin­a­tion of intel­li­gence, fun and charm; an unex­pec­ted gem.

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