Live Edges
Marco Campardo’s Live Edges collection features side tables with hand-carved lines around each edge (image: Marco Campardo).
Marco Campardo’s neon yellow and orange side tables have hand-carved lines around each edge which look like someone has nibbled them. “They are very croccanti,” Campardo says, using the Italian word for ‘crunchy’ to describe his Live Edges collection, which was first exhibited at Bazament Art Space during Tirana Art Weekend. “They remind you of something edible.”
Campardo has previously experimented with colours and forms that look like sweets: his Jello (2022-) collection features resin furniture with a glossy, dessert-like finish, and he has even used isomalt, a sugar substitute, to make vases which resemble glass jelly beans. He’s also experimented with wooden furniture that has a similarly gnawed aesthetic in his Lee (2023) and George (2019) collections, which use chiseled edges to add elements of craftsmanship to furniture made out of felled or reclaimed wood.
Although Live Edges combines elements of his previous work, the process of making the pieces differed greatly from his previous collections. Normally, Campardo allows material processes to guide him towards the final shape of his pieces – Jello, for example, was created by testing out low-tech rotational moulds, while the chiseled edges of Lee and George were made from experimenting with woodworking techniques. “For the Lee collection, I was literally taking a saw and roughly cutting the pieces without spending time thinking about the final shape,” he says. “I know that sounds silly, but it was that way.” Normally, Campardo plays with his materials and uses his curiosity to shape the material as he pleases. “Most of my pieces are very elementary, and for me the most important part is that they are process driven,” he explains, “so nothing has been designed in a traditional way, with a pencil.”
For Live Edges, however, drawing was an integral part of Campardo’s design. The collection was inspired by doodles he made while playing with his daughter’s magnetic board. The irregular parallel lines Campardo sketched served as a design motif for his pieces, which feature hand-carved indentations on each edge. For this collection, Campardo “[conceived] of the pieces from a sculpture perspective” for the first time, cutting maple wood into wiggly shapes to ensure that the resulting coffee table, bench, console and side tables would look different from every angle. “It’s new for me as an experience, as a way to achieve a shape,” Campardo says. “I would call it an evolution.”
In conventional woodworking, the live edge of a piece of wood is the natural edge of the material that has been left unfinished – but Campardo’s highly crafted neon pieces are a far cry from the aesthetic of untouched wood. “Everything in this show, except for the wood itself, is artificial, is man-made,” Campardo says, explaining that the title of the collection is intentionally misleading. Rather than detracting from their aliveness, however, Campardo believes that the vibrant colours and hand-carved details give the pieces more character and vibrancy. “The fact that the edges have been chiseled makes [them] even more alive, in my mind,” Campardo says.“They're a bit loud –they’re not silent objects.”
Interview Chiara Onofri
Words Chiara Onofri and Helen Gonzalez Brown