Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.It was while eating oxtail stew that sculptor Emma Witter discovered her material. “The bones looked like orchids,” she says. “They reminded me of the maquettes in Henry Moore’s studio.” Recognising that here lay an abundant resource, in 2014 Witter began an intensive period of experimentation with the bones of chickens and restaurant waste animals. Besides nutritious broth, once cleaned they provide a lightweight, strong material that can be carved and drilled to create elaborate structures. “They are beautiful, like ready-made sculptures,” she suggests.Witter is one of a number of designers and artists showing work created from a wide range of unusual materials used in unorthodox ways at this year’s PAD London art and design fair. Besides a box that Witter has made from a giant oyster shell, there will be stools from sisal yarn, lights from beech twigs and human hair, cabinets from silk worm husks, tables from copper wire and paper, and wall pieces from feathers, shells, raw cotton and jute sacks covered in Chinese lacquer.Luxury has often turned to unusual organic materials. In Renaissance Europe artisans created wonders for princely kunstkammer out of rare shells or exotic skeletons, and a century ago Art Deco designers used lacquer, crocodile skin, stingray hides (shagreen), mother of pearl, ivory and tortoise-shell to spectacular effect.Today, however, flaunting the pillage of natural resources is no longer fashionable. Instead, an alternative interaction with nature has emerged, confronting audiences more directly with the materials their objects are made from and encouraging them to turn from intrigued delight at the wizardry of makers to concern for the environment that surrenders these materials for our use.Nilufar Gallery in Milan will show a chandelier by Maximilian Marchesani made from soil, fine beech branches intertwined with human hair, acrylic and 15 LED light filaments. Marchesani explains that beech trees resemble human beings in their colonising voracity, dominating the woodlands they inhabit, their leaves smothering the undergrowth. But both are alike too in our shared vulnerability to climate change. He hopes his chandelier offers a model of “a hybrid creature that can combine natural and artificial elements in a benign way, in a new aesthetic”.Brazilian designer Tiago Braga, meanwhile, has created for the Paris gallery Brazil Modernist a series of seven light sculptures, the Arandu Estelar Collection, in collaboration with the artisans of the Ladrilã Association in southern Brazil. They have taken the fleece of the local sheep, usually viewed as worthless, then hand-felted and sewn it into more than 300 petals, from which the poetic lights are constructed. Their form is inspired, Braga says, by “the organic shapes of clouds and the star culture [knowledge of the night sky] of the Guarani Indigenous people — the original inhabitants of the Brazilian pampas”. Both the shearing of the sheep and the return of the nutrient-rich wool-washing water to the soil serve to maintain that challenged environment.Asian lacquer, derived from the Toxicodendron vernicifluum and related trees, has been used to ornament objects for millennia, its usual function to provide an immaculate surface. Vincent Cazeneuve, showing with Paris gallery Dumonteil Design, creates imposing sculptural wall pieces from jute sacks, traditional Chinese lacquer, ash and gold leaf that defy this aesthetic: “In my work, I try to disconnect from any historical context.” He has lived in Chongqing, China, for 16 years, driving into the mountains to source his lacquer directly from the harvesters, which he uses to petrify rice sacks in layers, “like creating fossils”.Kyeok Kim from South Korea has built her new Second Surface OB11 Side Table, on view with Charles Burnand, through a combination of “ottchil” (Korean lacquering) applied to a wooden base covered in layers of jute, with a top surface of crocheted copper wire also lacquered. Kyeok says of the multiple processes: “They are like old memories layering on top of each other.” By contrast, Pao Hui Kao (Spazio Nobile gallery in Ixelles, Belgium) uses Japanese lacquering techniques (urushi) to strengthen without thickening her cloudlike tables made from tracing paper and rice glue.There has been “an exponential growth of interest in the last five years from collectors and museums” in such material-focused work, says Florence Guillier-Bernard of gallery Maison Parisienne. She will show at PAD new work by Simone Pheulpin, 83, whose monochrome reliefs and objects made from tightly folded, densely coiled raw cotton resemble fine porcelain, and a diptych created from hand-cut and -inked birds feathers by Julien Vermeulen, 50 years Pheulpin’s junior. Guillier-Bernard has found a growing public excited by different making processes: “A whole range of materials has become acceptable.”At PAD, Sarah Myerscough Gallery will be showing a characterful bobbly cabinet by experimental designer Marlène Huissoud, made from Indian silkworm cocoons, honeybee bio resin, oak and pewter. As well as enjoying the cocoons’ formal properties, Huissoud has sought to celebrate the insects whose activities underpin life on Earth. Sarah Myerscough says: “The organic nature of these pieces attracts collectors who are prepared to accept that these things might be fragile. They are buying into a vision for the future.”PAD London runs October 8-13, padesignart.com
