Annmarie: Endurance Project

Endurance: bear hardship patiently; last for a long time

A wooden school chair has been replaced over the years in schools by all-in-one thick plastic chairs for health and safety reasons.

The picture has captured a close up look of the chair appearing used and worn out.
Cleaning the metal was a very tedious experience which involved turning the chair around frequently to remove the existing coat of paint. In order to achieve the desired effect I used special tools and materials e.g. circular sander, wire wool.

These are the newly recycled chairs.

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The wooden seat is separate from the base metal legs.

The chair seat has been sanded and rubbed down with coarse sand paper. The sanding process was effortless, which resulted in clean bare wood.

The finished chairs above come in two different styles.
left chair: the natural look
right chair: 1970's look with a twist

This is a gun powder barrel, approximately 2 feet high.

Very strong layered brown cardboard cylindrical container. The top lid is made of chip board while the bottom is hard cardboard with coating.

The metal rings have been removed from the barrel.

Cutting the cardboard evenly was extremely difficult due to the hardness of the cardboard.

The shape of the barrel determined the design of the chair and the workstation I created.

To create flexibility in the cardboard the two halves of the barrel were fused using garden rope and padding was used to protect the cardboard.

The picture below demonstrates the finished item, a child's work station.
The teddy bear material was used to cover the cardboard and make the item more appealing to a child.

Assembling the rings of the barrel was a difficult task due to thickness of the cardboard.
The cardboard had to be removed in order to fix the rivets to the rings.

A mini model was created out of a cardboard tube by cutting each ring from a cardboard toilet tube.

Various techniques were used to design seat covers e.g. simple French knitting.

In order to use the scraps of material they had to be cut into usable strips.

The strips were criss-crossed many times to produce a knitted effect.

The fabric above was made from strips of material tied together which were knitted together using a large needle.

The base was assembled using three metal rings, two of which are fused at the top to give the seat stability. These same rings are also fixed to the base. The seat of the chair is placed on top of the two rings held by a rivet.

The back of chair was made with a ring in the up position held by a rivet to the seat.

The arms of the chair were formed by cutting a metal ring in half. A groove was made in each half ring in order to fix them to the back and the seat of the chair. To reinforce the arms of the chair a screw and cap were placed to fix the back to each half rings.

The finished chair

Industrial thread reels made of thick cardboard painted with water proof paint obtained from the Ark (a recycling centre designed for educational purposes. I designed a director's chair in keeping with the same theme.