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Leathersellers’ Review 2024–2025
vessels, using hot-water moulding and an innovative scoring technique. “It got me thinking about ways I could create form, and I sort of accidentally fell upon this scoring of lines to inform the shape of objects,” explains Jackson. “The material reacted naturally around it – it was about embracing its qualities to create sculptural designs.” Owen Li, originally from Fujian, China, majored in industrial design and worked in product design for five years before enrolling on the Kingston MA course to bolster his hands-on production skills. Li was drawn to leather to make a collection of small household products, using a wet-moulding technique to give objects like pencil pots and vide-poches a honeycomb texture and ripple-like finish akin to the pattern formed by waves on a sandy beach. “Previously I didn’t have a chance to use leather to design products, because it’s mostly used in clothes or furniture, so I thought designing and making smaller scale products from it would be very interesting,” explains Li. “Because the donated leather was free, I had the chance to experiment much more with prototypes to figure out my design direction.”
Perhaps one of the most ingenious uses of leather as a component was at the hands of Kenji Chang, from New Taipei, who designed an articulated folding chair and stool inspired by traditional woodworking techniques with hinges made of leather. “I think furniture nowadays uses too much hardware and I think that breaks the beauty. I thought if I could replace the screws with leather, I would add more quality to the furniture. The donated leather gave me the opportunity to get to know the different characteristics and functions of leather and develop my project,” he says. For Aleks Cwikla, a Goldsmiths design graduate from Poland, her decision to work with leather came after gaining more of an understanding about the provenance and ethics of leather, and overcoming her personal reservations about the material. “Although I’ve always found leather a beautiful material, I was a bit conflicted whether to work with it, being a vegetarian,” says Cwikla, who created decorative objects by knitting and wet-moulding strips of vegetable-tanned leather. “Through my research, I found out how many hides go to waste from meat production and it actually pushed me to be a big advocate of leather – as long as the meat industry exists, why waste it?”
Right: Draped, sculptural leather design by Birmingham City University student Rohan Scott Opposite below: Kam Liang and Joe Jackson, Kingston School of Art MA students
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