Broached Commissions Debuts Broached Recall Collection.

Research-driven Australian gallery and studio Broached Commissions has launched its latest collection, Broached Recall, first debuted at Design Miami 2019. Double entendre to ‘recalling’ in a memory sense, the title refers to ‘recall’ in the same way that a manufacturing company would take back faulty products; though in this instance, Broached Commissions recalls design periods that have fallen out of favour and corrects them within a current aesthetic.

“We are recalling the 19th-century underpinnings of modernist design, of modern industry, and bringing these unfashionable pieces back into a factory for correction and fixing,” say Broached Commissions.

The collection comprises antiques harvested for their useful parts and repurposed into a range of furniture typologies. The resulting pieces are a hybrid of Victorian-era elements combined with new and sustainable materials, spanning batch manufactured small to medium-sized objects to bespoke, limited edition and highly complex works.

Examining the role of design in the pursuit of power, Broached Commissions determines that design must redefine the language that enthuses people to engage, moving away from a world of oversaturated product and toward one that champions biodiversity. Their means of combining antique parts with sustainable new material is their way of extracting the material wealth from an old system in order to celebrate the new.

A series of small, medium and large sized monoliths are made of various types of antique and dyed veneer, arranged in a striped formation. Each are functional, including cupboards, shelves and drawers revealed with the use of a magnetic patinated brass object. Alternating stripes are the collection’s signature pattern, with each piece featuring a different combination of antique timber and dyed veneer. Pairings include Burl walnut veneer with black dyed timber veneer, Blackwood timber with green veneer, and Huon pine timber with blue veneer.

“In material selection, the objects oscillate in the use of heritage and virgin timbers. The interplay between the two – like architecture in a city street where a heavy ornate late 19th-century neo-gothic bank abuts a massive mirrored glass skyscraper – creates a tension around the relationship between two highly assertive and deeply influential forms of power,” say Broached Commissions.

See other Broached Commissions projects on Yellowtrace here.

[Images courtesy of Broached Commissions. Design Miami photography by James Harris.]