Sophie Rowley Makes Furniture From Denim

New Zealand-born, Berlin-based designer Sophie Rowley gives new life to discarded post-consumer denim offcuts by recycling them into pieces of furniture with marble-like markings.

Called Bahia Denim, Rowley’s material development project has seen her transform discarded jean textiles into a series of tables featuring mottled patterns that bear a likeness to marble.

She layers the textile offcuts on top of each other and bonds it together using resin, before carving it into different elementary shapes and assembling them in playful ways to make furniture pieces.

This process makes each design unique; varied in size, shade, colour and texture by the non-standardised nature of the process and the waste materials used. Bahia Denim is characterised by its visual resemblance to marble, which is why it is named after the Brazilian blue marble Azul Bahia.

The project was born when Rowley started experimenting with different ways of reworking household waste, beginning with more commonplace remnants such as glass, styrofoam, textiles and plastics.

“By applying a set of industrial and craft processes to these waste materials, I was able to experiment until the materials took on completely new aesthetics and were almost simulating natural materials such as stone or wood,” Rowley told Dezeen.

“The idea of starting with something very worthless and making it into something aesthetic has always been appealing to me,” she continued.

Rowley completed the MA Material Futures at Central Saint Martins in London in 2014.

Original article by Natashah Hitti, Dezeen, March 1, 2019.