Projects

Stone is quarried in order to construct buildings and monuments. It is cut up and polished to make wonderful statues, objects and interior finishes, but stone is also extracted, mined, pulverised or burnt in order to extract minerals of many kinds to produce a great amount of the objects that populate our daily lives. Nevertheless, we hardly think of stone when we touch iron, unwrap food from aluminium foil or hold a battery in our hands. The design project Ratio embraces crafts in order to tell a story about stone and its hidden metallic mineral components.
Each piece in the series reveals the proportion of metal contained in a specific metal ore by combining it with its metallic equivalent in the form of metal sheeting. The size of a metal sheet 3 mm thick is always as big as the resulting material one would get when theoretically processing the stone into the metal.

Craftsmanship brings us closer to a material and what it actually takes to turn it into an object. To turn a rough stone into a piece of furniture requires many refined production steps by a skilled stonemason. Ratio pushes this aspect of transparency even further by revealing more aspects of the use of stone in our cultures. By making data tangible, the project highlights the fact that it takes a great amount of stone to turn it into a pure metal (as well other materials). Extracting stone requires a big amount of energy and changes a lot of landscapes. Thus, we as consumers should properly value and appreciate the things around us and choose wisely what we need and want.