Acid test: Revealing a rainbow in red cabbage

Eindhoven – With their new Color Collisions project, graduate designers Kirstie Van Noort and Rogier Arents are using organic dyes to achieve striking effects in ceramics.

The team presented Color Collisions at Dutch Invertuals, where designers were asked to create objects around the theme of conflict. Van Noort and Arents decided to use red cabbage as a dye for ceramics. Dipping the ceramics into acid or base solutions caused different reactions, or ‘conflicts’, producing different colours.

The passage of time also affected the outcome of the project. ‘After one hour the pink colour disappears, so it will turn into blue or green,’ Van Noort tells LS:N Global. ‘That’s also a conflict for us, how to catch the colour at the right stage of the dipping process.’

Designers are turning to delicate chemical processes to achieve spontaneous, intriguing effects. Read the Peaceful Processes section of our Sublime Materiality design direction for more.