Cork is such a special material. It always appeals to me how it looks and feels. And I really like it if designers come up with a way to make an attractive design by using wine or champagne stoppers. The first upcycle design I showed on upcycleDZINE using champagne corks was the ‘Celebration chandelier‘ by Alkesh Parmar. A unique an very nice design. And now I came across another design that makes use of cork, wine cork, and it’s called ‘CORKY‘ by Becki Chan, Vancouver | Canada.
Regular visitors of upcycleDZINE may know by now that I’ve got a weak spot for lighting design. But there’s an even bigger weak spot and that’s the city of Vancouver and its surroundings. I’ve got quite some relatives living there and a long time ago I went over there several times and one of those times stayed there for half a year. I must say that it was one of the best times I had. Since one of my uncles showed me slides of British Columbia and Vancouver when I was 6 or 7 years old I fell in love with that place. And now seeing the stunning CORKY and noticing designer Becki Chan living in Vancouver, I knew I had to post this!
Lighting shows light through cork
How did Becki come to designing CORKY: “Seeing hundreds of used cork wine-stoppers all together, we were entranced by the subtle variations in colour and texture. A simple object ruthlessly repeated can transform into an entity quite unlike the object itself. Cork proved to be a somewhat diffcult material to work with common tools, due to the inconsistent density. Cutting and drilling did, however, result in an object with potential to showcase the textural variety beautifully, through repetition and an application in a lighting fixture.”
Photos © Becki Chan
CORKY is a multifunctional upcycle design piece, a lamp and a side table into one. It can be thought of as a side table, night stand or floor lamp. “Following through on our project from an earlier show, we have, furthermore, built a chess board into the table base. This multifunctionality is possible due to the fact that side tables and night stands most often end up accommodating a table lamp in actual practice. Combing the two may seem like an action limiting consumer choice, but we feel it actually serves to aesthetically and functionally unify disparate, but often symbiotic objects.”
Design by Becki Chan
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