Bark
Bark is a collection of handcrafted furniture pieces made of ash structures and finished with the tree bark harvested from the same tree. The process began with a research into Victorian papier-mâché methods. Papier-mâché expanded from a handcraft practice into a sizeable industry forming the production model and techniques that would evolve into the plastics industry of the 20th century.
Studio Furthermore experimented with various techniques old and new to develop a sort of paper pulp that can be worked in a mould or bonded to other materials such as wood. We explored an array of natural materials and discovered that tree bark could be dried and ground into particles of various sizes. The ground bark can be mixed with a papier-mâché recipe to form a pulp. This pulp can then be squeezed onto a wooden surface and left to dry forming a new kind of skin. By doing this, the skin of the original tree is returned to the timber structure of an item of furniture.
