A series of prototypes executed using the process of pressure casting on slices of bamboo cane. These bowls are probes, studies on the possibilities of bamboo to redefine the personal everyday ecology of our domestic environments. They were produced in 1999 by one of my students, Oskar Kjörneberg, in an attempt to translate the linear quality of bamboo cane into the spatial qualities required for an open container. Bowls are familiar objects that we use to store, serve and transport food. These bowls are permeable and reflect the same principle found in the bamboo steamer: the possibility of letting something through –steam, water, air- in a way that it may affect, modify or transform what is contained. It is almost the antithesis of petroleum-based (plastic) hermetic containment, where hermeticism and impermeability are the prevailing qualities, and the separation between what is contained and the outside is inflexible. Some may say these are not practical objects, but what does practical mean, after all, when we talk about things? It is true that these bowls are not meant to hold liquids, or fine grains; they are designed to hold larger pieces, fruits and vegetables, perhaps, edibles of a certain size. The value of the experiment is to test the value of imperfection, and the possibilities imperfection yields when understood as a positive, rather than a negative, quality. These bowls criticize senseless containment in the way they define new types of relating to, and transporting, what we eat.
