To whisper the word ‘plastics’ today is to conjure a vision of how the recent past imagined the future. The same incantation also summons the specter of costs unforeseen, and a civilization run amok of nature. Handmade Industrials' new body of work, consisting of fourteen sculptural bioplastic vessels, acknowledges these divergent connotations by pointing to a path of lesser harm while rekindling the awe of innovative materials and processes.

Handmade Industrials’ practice is founded upon Rutger de Regt and Marlies van Putten’s shared interest in process-based experimentation; they seek to adapt industrial materials and processes into expressive, handmade, and unique-production applications. Their core innovation, developed early in their collaboration, is a proprietary process called "Make & Mold". Working with polymer pellets in a flexible latex membrane, they intuitively sculpt forms directly with their hands, aided by simple restraints like zip ties and vice grips. Recognizing the importance of environmental sustainability, their polymer material is a non-petrochemical plastic derived from Caprolacton, a fatty acid, miscible with water, that is found naturally in various plant oils and animal fats. When set with heat it becomes both stable and watertight.

In the two-year hiatus since creating their last series of vessels, Rutger and Marlies have focused on producing furniture, large-scale forms, which brought them fresh appreciation for the power and potential of smaller scale work. This new series emphasizes densely complex compositions in the smallest scale possible. With playful creativity they have maximized the number of voids in each piece, producing a result that is eerily unreal and otherworldly. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how these writhing shapes came into existence, appearing like pure, fantastical form inexplicably made real.