Teun Zwets
Teun Zwets (1992) makes unique, functional sculptures from discarded material. Intuitive, fast and without a fixed plan, with bold colour and room for imperfection. Graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven (2020).
ABOUT
Teun Zwets (1992) is a Dutch designer who prefers to work without a fixed plan. His approach is spontaneous, intuitive and marked by a good deal of nerve. In 2020 he graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven with Teunland, a colourful and surprising furniture collection built from found materials. When the graduation show was cancelled because of the pandemic, he built his own exhibition in an empty classroom. That same period saw him present work at Kazerne in Eindhoven and receive the Kazerne Design Award, an annual incentive prize for recent graduates of the academy.
The starting point of his work is material others discard. He finds beauty precisely in other people's waste, and designs by doing rather than by deliberating. His practice is emphatically material-driven: leftover material is glued, screwed or tied together into unique, functional sculptures. Speed keeps him focused — most pieces come into being within a single day, from first intervention to final form. Imperfection plays a leading role, and he has a taste for grand gestures and outspoken colour.
The Splitted series brings this together: one-off furniture in split Douglas fir, with the axe as the shaping tool. Each piece is extensively sanded, primed and finished in a hard-wearing high-gloss lacquer, so that the grain of the wood determines the form. For Lensvelt he developed ten unique objects from the brand's own production waste — a reversal of his usual method, in which the available material rather than the design became the point of departure.
His work shifts the boundary between waste and worth, and is, in his own words, almost therapeutic: the objects make his thoughts visible.