Elbrich van der Wal is a designer and maker studying the Master's programme in Applied Arts and Design: Wood Oriented Furniture Design at HDK-Valand Campus Steneby. Her degree project, Making is Optional, looks at furniture not as a finished result but as a starting point.
The project is a collection of five pieces in solid pine, joined with visible screws and screen printed with markings that map alternative forms hidden inside each piece: a bench that contains a chair, a chair that contains a coffee table. The visible construction becomes part of the design, a way of lowering the threshold for a user to take the object apart and remake it into something else.
For Elbrich, craftsmanship is less about arriving at a fixed, polished outcome and more about all the choices and possibilities along the way: what does it take, materially and structurally, to make transformation an invitation rather than a repair job?
