999 is a console table featuring a wet-moulded, hollow leather piece with the imprint of a police shield as a tabletop and steel tube legs with a subtle detail of a police baton sculpted as part of its structure.
Through referencing the police, which acts both as an inspiration and a suppressor of the queer (leather) community, the table aims to provoke and highlight the material’s queer past, helping to question the refined, polished, de-sexualised and polite expectancies from the furniture/interiors of the traditional and conventional domestic space.
Vegetable tan leather , dye and mild steel
The queer community has reclaimed the police leather aesthetic and made a parody of a hypermasculine and patriarchal, aggressive figure by turning it into an unapologetically erotic, gender binary destabilising and community-building tool for themselves, through using the material in fashion.
I wanted to execute the expressive qualities of leather in furniture design to help build on the queer visibility, starting to touch upon the norms of the domestic space and how the material has potential to disrupt that, just as how the community made use of it once through attire.
Process:
Scaled model experimentation.
Exploring leather alone as a table top.
Initial wet moulding experiments.
A toy police shield and baton were used to create the forms.
1:1 scale wet moulds made using a custom built, extended police shield to give length to the table top.
Lacquered inside to help hold the shape and provide strength.
Leg iterations.
Incorporating the police baton form.
230.00
1000.00