Sir John Soane’s Museum invites designers to reinterpret collection

Designers are responding to objects in the Sir John Soane’s Museum London with a series of original commissioned pieces.

Curatorial collective Workshop for Potential Design has invited five artists and designers to create new objects which are inspired by fragments of artifacts found inside the museum’s Number 12 Breakfast Room.

The new pieces will displayed inside the museum as an exhibition for the London Design Festival.

“Intriguing picture of the whole”

Curator Tetsuo Mukai says: “Each ancient fragment within the Museum suggests an incomplete, yet intriguing picture of the whole.

“These fascinating pieces invite the viewer to speculate on the whole, and encourage us to draw our own, unique conclusions.”

Visitors will only have the newly designed object in front of them and will have to use it to make this leap.

“The exhibition explores the idea of how the incomplete could shape the complete,” Mukai says.

Product designer Gemma Holt has created a piece called Arranging Marbles which shows how fragments of architectural marbles can become a whole.

Sam Jacob Studio has created Lenin’s Urn, which uses the railing finial found outside the Tavistock Square house where Lenin stayed in 1908 as its starting point.

Artist, designer and typographer Paul Elliman’s work is in three parts: Baby you can have whatever you like; After America; and Low Currency. It encourages to think about currency, time and “the state of the city.”

Pieces is part of the London Design Festival and runs from 18-26 September 2015.