“From this day forward” is curated by Italian critic Diana Marrone, and it is the first solo show outside England by London based designers JamesPlumb.

The overlooked, discarded and time-worn have a new found confidence and identity under their hand, with their luminaires, assemblage, and interiors sitting between design and art. In combining, restoring, and finding new habitats for the unwanted they celebrate and reveal stories that might have gone untold, and in new function find new tales.

sampson

JamesPlumb will live, sleep, and work in the tent environment they create, inviting the audience to view their latest processes and projects. Each day of the exhibition JamesPlumb invite the public to eat and drink with them in their travelling home – hosting tea and cakes from 5 pm to 7 pm at Zona K.

dianne marrone

According to Diana Marrone, “ it is a true collection of uniquely reworked furniture – mostly one-offs, but also multiples and limited editions. Their works include lighting, decorative objects, and sculptures that are more functional and less fictional than those found in the visual art world.

All are distinguished by the love JamesPlumb have for even the smallest forgotten relic – they create on the border between storytelling and set design, psychoanalysis and philology of the object. Art and design for JamesPlumb is to keenly and critically re-use what is already present (in form, tools and materials) – to give new life, and sometimes new function, to objects. In exploring the unwanted, I see JamesPlumb creating a hint of retro-punk aesthetics with a unique touch, versatile for new nomadic lives.”

James Plumb: “We relish chance encounters with the overlooked and discarded, and the opportunity to celebrate and reveal the stories which might have gone untold. We simply love unearthing objects with a personal history, that show the marks and traces of time – often marrying two objects together to create entirely new characters yet always grounded in their origins.”

By creatively exploiting fetishisms, the duo let objects speak in a way that takes account of the value of materials, the efforts to consume less and the need to be more responsible.

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JamesPlumb is Hannah Plumb (1981) and James Russell (1980), a couple in life and work – who met in 1998 at Wimbledon School of Art studying Fine Art Sculpture.

Their combined name of JamesPlumb represents the single artistic voice that builds on their different but complementary approaches