The revolutionary effects of the rise of flat pack furniture, that commenced towards the end of the 20 th Century, can still very much be felt today. There are very few homes, places of work or leisure that won’t contain at least one piece of machine-manufactured furniture that was in turn assembled by the end user via a set of illustrated instructions. No doubt with an odd number of fixtures and fittings remaining at the end of the process.
Much of this type of furniture is made from a core of cost-effective chipboard, a material that is as aesthetically appealing as the underside of a battered old coaster, neatly coated in a double skin of micro-thin melamine. Often white, sometimes with a wood grain effect and on occasion, brown in colour. Bart Joachim van Uden has decided to tackle this unrelenting wave of cheap and not so cheerful utilitarian furniture by covering it in large-scale images selected from Google Earth. The visual similarities to natural stone and marbles are deliberate, the ‘exclusive’ feel of such materials is shrewdly mimicked via the very same methods that a high street chain would create a pine effect – only in this case it looks awe-inspiring!
