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Afrika Nova | Ethical Design from South Africa
Recycled plastic lamps by Heath Nash
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Heath Nash is a South African designer with a passion for reusing and recycling. He was born in 1976 in Zimbabwe and now lives and works in Cape Town.
Nash uses local labour and traditional craftsmanship to create beautiful lamps out of recycled plastic bottles. The wirework involved in the lamp making process is also a local skill that is used in his studio. The white plastic is easier to come by than the coloured, so when Nash gets enough of ‘other people’s rubbish’ in full colour, the effect is spectacular.
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So how does a pile of plastic waste become a stunning Flower Ball light? Try this at home – you will need scissors!
1. Lots of old plastic bottles are found and sorted.
2. They are washed with bio-degradable detergent and dried.
3. The handles and bases are carefully removed, and each bottle is splayed open into a semi-flat ‘sheet’.
4. As many flowers as possible are cut from each bottle sheet. The sheets are not perfectly flat, thus this is done by hand with a hammer – not in a mechanised press.
5. Now each flower has to be formed from a flat shape into a more 3-dimenional form - each petal is folded in half, and lines are creased into each (also by hand). If a flower has 8 petals, and there are 9 lines on each one, someone has creased 72 lines! For ONE flower...
6. Finally, ONE flower is done!
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Heath Nash
Creating his Flower Ball lamp at Tokyo Designtide in 2007 |
The process is very time- and labour intensive. The simplest light requires 240 flowers. Imagine the kind of alchemy at play when precious time is spent making a handcrafted object. There are literally hours invested in every single part of each light, and this invested time and human energy is what makes the product beautiful, and inherently valuable.
But the vision behind “Other People’s Rubbish” was not just a beautiful end-product. Back in 2004, when the idea was born, the work was intended as a form of social upliftment for South Africans in desperate need of jobs, and as a way to promote the idea of re-use and environmental awareness in a very unaware at the time South African public.
Since then Heath Nash went a long way. From fetching trailer loads of used bottles from local garbage dumps, washing them and cutting flowers in his own backyard, he is now involved in what he loves and does best – prototyping and doing custom work for clients all around the world. The collection, cleaning, cutting and creasing is being handled by a separate project in Cape Town, and more and more individual wire crafters are being involved in the assembly of the end products. This opens new possibilities of earning sustainable income for more and more people outside Heath Nashes studio. |
| In recent years, Heath Nash has exhibited worldwide, including Tokyo, Milan, London, Vienna, New York, Los Angeles, Helsinki and Stockholm. He was the South African Elle Decoration designer and lighting designer of the year in 2005/6, and won the British Council title of ‘South African Creative Entrepreneur of the Year’ in 2006/7. Nash is a graduate of the University of Cape Town with a degree in Fine Arts. |
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For additional information, prices and delivery terms in Denmark, please contact Natalka Hansen on +45 3194 6727, or email nh@afrikanova.dk.
If you are interested to learn more about Heath Nash and things he makes, visit his website www.heathnash.com.
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