“A lot of this stuff has no future, basically,” Fletcher Barns tells me over a Zoom call. The “stuff” he’s referring to isn’t the chairs, sconces, and trash cans he and his partner, James L. Marshall, produce with their design studio, BMDO, but the detritus that they begin with: a beat-up headlight, a discarded table, scraps of carpet.

Barns, who’s based in Melbourne, developed a knack for giving dead-end objects a fresh start, having grown up on a ranch in remote Australia, well before the Amazon era. He remembers reusing a tire to fix a hose once. “It was just from a sense of practicality because to be able to get something, you had to drive for eight hours, and then eight hours back,” he says.

He and Marshall have since made reusing materials into an art: Chair 9, the star of their first solo show with Oigall Gallery in Melbourne, where Marshall lives, began with those carpet pieces, which the duo affixed to secondhand polished aluminum panels for a seat that’s lent some softness by the patterned fibers. Some would call this upcycling, so I ask if this is a sustainability effort in some way. It isn’t. “That’s not really a conscious part,” Barns says. “I think we both see things we like in things that already exist.”

You can learn more about BMDO by visiting the studio’s website or on Instagram.

Top image courtesy BMDO

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