by JULIE LASKY, The New York Times, May 15, 2013
Merel Karhof in the Netherlands, where she has set up a temporary factory using wind to make furniture
Photo: Herman Wouters for The New York Times
Source: www.nytimes.com
This week, Merel Karhof, a 34-year-old Dutch designer who lives in London, set up a small, temporary factory in the Netherlands to make furniture with wind. For the project, called Windworks, she collaborated with the owners of two neighboring windmills in Zaanse Schans, in the province of North Holland: one, a sawmill that cut the wood used in her collection of chairs, stools and benches; the other, a paint mill that ground the minerals with which she dyed wool upholstery fabric produced through her own wind-powered knitting machine. Speaking by phone from the Netherlands, Ms. Karhof, who studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands and at the Royal College of Art in London, discussed the evolution of her interest in the invisible forces of nature.
Q. You’ve been at this for a while.
A. At the Royal College of Art, I did a big research about wind. I started making these little jewelry pieces — brooches — quite simply from plastic. And I made them as a test to see how the wind was behaving around the body of a human. I made a performance where I covered myself with little windmills and I walked around the city to see where the wind was and how the wind behaves when you’re on a rooftop or when you’re opening a door. [...]