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17-25 October 2026

Casting Standards

An uncanny experience of seeing one tool but feeling another.

Hosted by MacAulay Brown Works

This project is now archived and was part of DDW24

Event type

Exhibition

Casting Standards Collection
Casting Standards Collection
MacAulay Brown Works
Casting Standards is a specialty cutlery collection that recycles un-stylish utensils through a technique of repair-through-collage. This project montages existing popular handles to restore forgotten tableware. Now, when you grab the spoon for a sip of soup, you feel a pair of pliers in your hand.

Haptic Signatures

There is an enormous amount of latent design that populates the handles of our contemporary consumer objects. Haptic signatures that are embedded into the tools we use everyday. Designs that are studied and iterated inorder to make an object immediately identifiable when it is picked up and touched. We can identify a Gillette razor from a Schick, just by the way it feels.

Forgotten Tableware

Casting Standards, looks to re-energize these un-stylish utensils by deploying a technique of “repair-through-collage”. This project montages existing popular handles to restore forgotten tableware. Now, when you grab the spoon for a sip of soup, you experience a pair of pliers in your hand. An uncanny experience of seeing one tool but feeling another.

Surreal Tools

We handcraft unique and unusual tableware by replacing the standard handles of cutlery with as-found objects such as screwdrivers, toothpaste tubes or hairspray cans. We build molds of these existing objects, in order to recreate them by casting recycled epoxy. Then, we mount each cast onto a piece of tableware (fork, knife, spoon etc.) becoming a surreal tool for the dinner table. The handles are objects we are all used to holding in our hands, but by recasting them onto tableware they act both familiar and strange.
Color Offsets
Color Offsets
MacAulay Brown Works
Color Offsets
Color Offsets
MacAulay Brown Works
Assortment of Handles
Assortment of Handles
MacAulay Brown Works
At the Dinner Table and in the Dishwasher
At the Dinner Table and in the Dishwasher
MacAulay Brown Works

About MacAulay Brown Works

MacAulay Brown’s work investigates images, objects and spaces that exist in-between the collision of desperate realities—Collage. Having been educated in both art and architecture, his practice osculates back-and-forth between these mediums, making sense of their overlaps. His work aims to develop an aesthetic practice built upon “repair” and the subsequent beauty of outmoded realities. These repairs provided a glimpse of our wasteful past while moving us toward a recycled future—a double image.