cups

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Design Food

Gourds Grown in Vessel-Shaped Molds Become Reusable Cups and Flasks

With Jun Aizaki’s latest design, you could be picking up your morning latte poured into a dried gourd rather than a disposable adorned with a green siren. The Brooklyn-based designer, who owns CRÈME, recently launched a project to reduce single-use plastic waste by shaping the flowering fruit into simple drinking vessels. Heading The Gourd Project, Aizaki created both a cup and a flask that can hold hot and cold liquids and are an alternative to traditional products. After three to six uses, the containers can be composted with other food waste.

Aizaki “explored the century-old craft of drying plants to make receptacles, in order to find a way to reduce plastic and contribute to nature through design,” project organizers said. Each biodegradable vessel takes about six weeks to grow from its first planting at a Pennsylvania farm with six harvests each year. Because gourds have tough skin and fibrous insides, they’re shaped easily as they fill out. Each 3D mold is made of plastic right now, although the team hopes to switch to reusable materials once it expands production.

The sustainable project comes amid reports that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is increasing plastic consumption and affecting how, and if, the material is recycled, in addition to companies banning reusable cups and containers to stop the spread of the virus.

Follow the design firm’s waste-conscious products on Instagram, and stay tuned for the project’s upcoming launch on Kickstarter. You also might want to check out this lobster shell upcycle.

Art Craft

Ceramic Mugs That Imitate Used Cardboard by Artist Tim Kowalczyk

Ceramic artist Tim Kowalczyk is drawn to objects of little material value—crushed tin cans, ripped up cardboard, and Polaroids that have been damaged during development. It is in these typical throw aways that he finds beauty, an attraction to the history embedded in their wrinkles and folds. To memorialize these items Kowalczyk creates their likeness in clay, creating works that look exactly like mugs haphazardly formed from cardboard with “Please Handle With Care” stickers still stuck to their sides.

“Ceramic’s ability to replicate any form, texture, or surface is what draws me to the material,” says Kowalczyk in his artist statement. “Replicating real objects out of ceramic material and putting them in a tableau is my version of writing a poem. I am able to sculpt, form, design, and construct sculptures with a sense of purpose, priority, and preciousness.”

The Illinois-based artist graduated with an MFA from Illinois State University in 2011, and is the adjunct Ceramics instructor at Illinois Central in East Peoria, IL. You can see more of his work on his website or at Companion Gallery where he is represented.

Illustration

New Panoramic Coffee Cup Illustrations by Adrian Hogan

A video posted by Adrian Hogan (@adehogan) on Aug 6, 2015 at 8:15pm PDT

Illustrator Adrian Hogan (previously) continues to document the world around him in these detailed panoramic coffee cup sketches which he draws and shares on Instagram in these fun videos. Whether sitting in the coffee shop itself or out and about around his home in Tokyo, he incorporates buildings, streets, friends, and the minutiae of everyday life as he works his way around the edge of each cup. Hogan works as a commercial illustrator, bringing his sketchbook style to storefronts, Japanese magazines, and other editorial projects. You can find more of his work and an interview over on Mas Context.

A video posted by Adrian Hogan (@adehogan) on Oct 18, 2015 at 5:28am PDT

A video posted by Adrian Hogan (@adehogan) on Feb 16, 2016 at 10:48pm PST

A video posted by Adrian Hogan (@adehogan) on May 2, 2016 at 5:08pm PDT

A video posted by Adrian Hogan (@adehogan) on Dec 2, 2015 at 11:10pm PST

Art

Cecilia Levy Produces Eggshell-Thin Cups and Saucers Out of Spiderman Comics and Century-Old Books

Swedish artist Cecilia Levy creates cups, saucers, bowls, plates and saucers out of paper, turning delicate 2D materials into layered 3D sculptures. Although she often uses books from the beginning of the last century, her choices are not narrow as she has also utilized Spiderman comics for an entire series.

To create each work, she takes apart the books, magazines, and comics, tearing the pages and pasting small pieces of them back together. Levy explains her works are, “eggshell thin, yet remarkably steady. The story lives on, but in a different shape.”

Cecilia Levy’s background is in graphic design and bookbinding, but began to experiment with dissecting books to produce different shapes in 2009. Since 2013 Levy has worked full time as a paper artist, exhibiting her work in both Sweden and abroad.

Art

Melting Ceramics by Livia Marin

When dropping a ceramic plate or cup we’ve all braced for the familiar sound of impact as the object explodes into a multitude of sharp fragments on the kitchen floor. Artist Livia Marin imagines a wholly different demise for ceramic bowls, cups and tea pots in this series of work titled Nomad Patterns.

Inexplicably, each piece seems to melt onto a surface while strangely retaining its original printed pattern. The designs are actually a Willow Pattern motif, a pastiche of Chinese landscape decoration created by an English man in the 1790s “as if” it were Chinese. She adds via email that the objects “appear as staged somehow indeterminately between something that is about to collapse or has just been restored; between things that have been invested with the attention of care but also have the appearance of a ruin.” The 32 objects were on view at Eagle Gallery in London in 2012.

You can see much more over on her website, and learn more at Eagle Gallery. (via if magazine)

Design

Creature Cups: A Wildlife Surprise in your Coffee Cup

I love these ceramic creature cups by design group Yumi-Yumi out of Brookyln. At the base of each mug rests an animal that’s slowly revealed as you consume your tasty beverage. Good to the last dripping octopus.