Description

Icelandic designer Katrín Ólína has collaborated with Made by Choice to create home products that celebrate reading. Small Reading Horse is a small portable Bookshelf. It is a simple construction of two 35mm bent laminated plywood tubes held together by two bars. In Icelandic, a reading horse is someone who loves to read. Books are portals to other worlds. Icelandic culture has its roots in literature and Icelanders are avid readers and book lovers. Around 10% of the population will publish a book in their lifetime. “I worked on a research project with a local metal workshop in North Iceland in the years following the financial crash 2013-15. The objective was to look at ways to introduce new production possibilities to a small local business. As a tool to explore furniture and product design, I opted to work with an outdated, but well functioning tube-bending machine that was used to make exhaust pipes for cars. The machine only had one radius available for bending, which restricted the design process in a fun way. I created a series of home furniture in bent steel tube and included found materials and dead stock of decorative metal parts that belonged to the workshop into the design process. Through this process I created a series of products that focused on the Art of Reading. Together with the workshop we produced the series on a tiny scale for a period of time. It is wonderful to see the Reading Horse edition brought to life again in wood with Made by Choice.”

Katrín Ólína

Katrín Ólína Pétursdóttir was born in Iceland in 1967. She studied Industrial Design in Paris and worked in international design studios before establishing on her own in 2007. She now lives in Reykjavik and Helsinki. Over the course of her career, Ólína has cultivated a provocative two- dimensional graphic language that explores the imagination. Her work has been applied in the fields of product design, fashion, interiors, print, and anim...

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