Avocado leather cabinet
(2023)
from the Conflict Avocados project 2023
- Medium
- avocado skin, Walnut (Juglans sp.), plywood, steel, brass
- Measurements
- 92.8 × 194.5 × 50.3 cm
- Place/s of Execution
- London, England
- Accession Number
- 2024.157
- Department
- Contemporary Design and Architecture
- Credit Line
- National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased with funds donated by The Andrew & Geraldine Buxton Foundation, 2024
© Fernando Laposse - Gallery location
- Not on display
- About this work
-
Throughout Conflict avocados, the avocado has been dissected and applied as a design material to spark curiosity about the plant and its place of origin in Mexico. The exterior of Avocado leather cabinet is clad in avocado skin that has been transformed into a tough, finished marquetry. After collecting waste skins from a local guacamole vendor near their studio in Mexico City, designer Fernando Laposse and his team systematically dried, stretched and flattened the avocado skins and fashioned them into a repeated tile, protecting the edges of each with a fine walnut timber frame. The scale of the marquetry pattern has a direct relationship to the properties of the material it is made from. Rather than decoupling materials from their origin as is often the case in contemporary production, Laposse is deliberate in making sources legible.