We are honoured to be selected as one of twenty Scottish designers taking part in the BOOKENDS exhibition as part of Dundee Design Festival 2024.

Our design process began with a reading of “Dundee’s Two Intrepid Ladies” written by Susan Keracher – which sprung forward a number of rich material palettes that the journalists collected throughout their travels. A particular section – outlining a dinner party in the Tokyo suburbs – stood out above all else for its material beauty. The night culminated with a “tea ceremonial” that unwrapped a palette of lacquerware, bronze, charcoal, rough clay and irise.

The bronze and carbon body of the weights bring to mind smouldering charcoals, held within the hibachi fire bowl, awaiting their participation in the ceremony. One can feel the “rough and common clay” of the teabowls when handling the sandcast surface of the weights. The private recesses of the teahouse are manifest in the standing pillar form – stripped of ornamentation and “of the most simple”. Their receding carbon skin finding union in the shade.

The Ceremonial Weights in bronze were sand cast by Alistair Byars at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, using our existing Stonemason’s Weights as the master pattern. The process begins with a rammed sand mould, which is then dusted with a sacrificial carbon coating in order to ensure a clean release can be made by the subsequent molten bronze. Recycled Bronze is prepared and melted on-site to nearly 1000°C before being poured into the upstanding moulds. These now smouldering and smoking bodies are left overnight to cool before being broken open to retrieve their contents the next day. The cast pillars are lightly wire brushed, to remove the excess sand particles that have partially bonded to their surface.

A key piece of processing was the decision to leave the seamlines present. These seamlines, running the height of each pillar, are created when the liquid bronze settles in tiny gaps present between the two halves of the sand mould. Rather than removing seamlines, as is standard, we felt that simply bringing the lines to a high polish created a beautiful counterbalance to the bronze’s rough, carbonised majority. The polished bronze almost feels as though it is pushing its way out of the pillars from the inside, or marrying the two halves by kintsugi. The ends of the pillars are ground, flattened and polished to provide a clean standing surface and to allow a perfectly parallel relation. The finished bodies are waxed, to fix the carbon to the surface and bring a subtle lustre to the exposed bronze.

BOOKENDS is a specially commissioned collection of 20 bookends designed and made in Scotland. Inspired by the adventures of pioneering Dundonian journalists Marie Imandt and Bessie Maxwell in 1894, design curator Dr Stacey Hunter invited 20 of Scotland’s most exciting contemporary designers to each create a daring and unique pair of bookends. Read more about the origins of BOOKENDS and Dundee Design Festival via https://2024.dundeedesignfestival.com/exhibitions/bookends/

Photography by Alistair Byars and Paula Szturc