Guy Keulemans graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven this autumn. Born and raised in Australia, he decided to study overseas. Why did he choose the Netherlands, and how has that decision affected his practice?
Guy Keulemans: "I completed my bachelors degree at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney, and always intended to do a masters degree overseas. It took a few years before happening, and I had some interesting experiences beforehand working in print graphics in Tokyo, but eventually returned to my love for object and furniture design by enrolling at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. It was the quality of the students work, and the opportunity to learn from some amazing designers like Dick van Hoff, and Gijs and Aldo Bakker, that motivated my decision to go to the school.
What has leaving Australia brought to your work?
I think the most important thing about leaving Australia is that is has given me more confidence. Also a perspective of distance on Australian design, and whether an Australian quality shows in my work. Actually I don't worry about it anymore because it should just express naturally. You can see this in Europe where many national design scenes are in close proximity and all influencing each other. Yet you can still discern the national traits, say the German love for precision, Italian passion, or the critical nature of the Dutch, embedded in their design. Its not there on purpose, its just there. Likewise, there is Australian aesthetics, a sense of jokiness, ruggedness and D.I.Y ingenuity. But it doesn't need to be consciously emphasised, it just manifests when needed.
My silver toilet brush is an example. I made it at a time when I was feeling very frustrated with some of the mentors and their over-emphasis on 'conceptual sustainability' in the Masters program at the Design Academy. My solution was to build something of a piss take, a toilet brush made from silver that can also be flat packed and self-assembled, which is ridiculous because anyone that can afford a solid silver toilet brush is not going to worry about the price economies of flat packing. At the same time, they are both technical solutions; flat-packing and self-asembly reduces cost, and silver is an oligodynamic metal, a powerful anti-bacterial. Subsequently, the combination creates a tension between the concepts of luxury and sustainability that's perfect as a commentary on high-end 'sustainable' design, and also perfect for the dunny. And you can always melt it down and sell it if you can't pay the rent.
How do you see your work related to (interior)architecture?
Recently I have become a little obsessed with Ettore Sottsass, in part because I have been invited to contribute to an exhibition of his Superboxes at the Marres Art Centre. Sottsass was very sensitive to the effect of furniture on interior architecture, and he once said, "a room should have few objects in it, and those objects should be so intense they vibrate." My own work follows this idea, my furniture is not something you can knock up next to the Ikea bookshelf, its too demanding. I see furniture and household products as domestic sculpture - a physical realisation of an idea or aesthetic. This realisation is not fixed, it should be flexible and differ from person to person and across time. Furniture is like movable architecture in this way, and good furniture should last as long as good architecture, a time span of decades and centuries, growing and maturing in its story and contextual relevance. 
I think this is clear in the appearance of the LKBP furniture. It looks and functions like a contemporary antique. Interestingly, many of the favourable comments about it during Dutch Design Week came from people over 50 or 60 years old. Technically its constructed to survive, with strong, traditional glue-less joinery which can be dissembled and repaired easily. Its sold with the data files for the CNC-cut components, so they can be re-cut easily by machine if needed. I plan to release the data files "into the wild" onto the internet so it can archived by servers around the world, another way to preserve, by digital reproduction. My research document for this furniture, my masters' thesis Objects for Atheists, is academic, and maybe interesting, but sometime in the future the furniture should also acquire new, spontaneous and historically generated meanings.
To say this in another way is to say that the life of an object can be sustained through the engagement of our subjective interpretation. This is my schizoanalytical approach to making objects. At the moment in contemporary design, people are in love with 'stories' - there are even new university programs on things like "narrative environments". The thing is that, at least on a commercial level, these stories are written as static and optimal, designed to produce the best and most consequential impact on the viewer or prospective buyer. But unlike the objects themselves, stories are not fixed, they mutate from person to person, from critic to critic, and this mutation can be used as an excellent way to maintain interest. SMASH REPAIR, my collaboration with Martijn Dijkhuizen, became like this. It evolved from a concise starting point, but it became more complex. Its a generative system of "smashing" that is unpredictable, but mediated by the hand, the craft of "repairing". Two dynamics in play which build up form. Making, or, you could say, performing it, in the gallery space at Platform 21 over summer put me in contact with many visitors, each of whom had different interpretations of what I was doing. And being a somewhat repetitious project for the hand, it left my mind free to embellish these interpretations and eventually write them into a PDF linked from my blog. Some of them I now disregard as unimportant, others I continue to build upon. In this way, the narrative process is like the physical process; the stories are smashed, then repaired, in the process mutating and gaining strength. Suitably, without any given explanation, the physical appearance of the table is quite ambiguous. Why the fuck are there so many nuts and bolts? And what are the patterns on the wood? Some of the stories explain that, and some others don't.
Can you elaborate on the role of your blog?
Despite the fact that I dislike the word 'blog', they have been very useful for me. I began the first as a simple way to quickly post pictures of my projects, but I continue the second blog as a research tool. I really don't understand anything until I write it down. I not even bothering anymore to produce a 'real' portfolio website; I've designed 2 or 3 in the past few years but I hardly ever activate them, they seem too static. Everything you could possibly want to know about my work is on my blogs, even if it its not so media friendly. One person that reads about a project here will find a different interpretation from someone that reads about it there. But I'm a tired with cut and paste journalism so I guess I am discouraging that by asking people to invest a bit more time in understanding my work. I'm sure it will make many enemies, or at least, jaded commentary. 
The Kids Energy House is like this; the idea was to promote energy saving in the Netherlands, and, it was a group project, we decided to focus on children by designing a dolls house to explain sustainable living, such as using solar hot water heating and green walls for summer cooling. Adults are too old to learn new habits, unless tricked into it, but kids are like pliable clay. So its designed with them in mind. Bold lines, squares and circles, simple to understand geometry that implies a rule based system, but with a few inconsistencies to keep kids interested. It comes flat packed as components that can be assembled by parent and child together, a nice opportunity for a parent to teach their child about the sustainability issues, and that's the trick, because in the process the adults learn themselves.
I guess the most notable thing when you look at my work is that its quite varied in style. Many conceptual designers are quite happy moving from concept to concept when producing new work, I am the same but I also like to move from style to style. Aesthetics are my love, and there is no reason for them to remain consistent. Aesthetics are our senses and perception of objects, and the way they can be engaged and activated is fascinating, even when ugly or brutal. The design of sensations and intellectual perception is the most important aspect of what I do.
Guy Keulemans, November 2009
