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Straits Times

Designers rediscover the decorative potential of eggshells

One of the Pleiades vessels embellished with solar nebula, constellations, and moon craters in eggshell and abalone. PHOTO: ALEXANDER LAMONT VIA NYTIMES UNITED STATES – While you were clucking over the price of eggs, Mr Mark de la Vega was devouring them by the dozen – 300 dozen in the past six months. But not as omelettes. Mr de la Vega, a designer in Brooklyn, produces panels and furnishings ornamented with eggshell lacquer. The finish originated with East Asian artisans, who embedded shell fragments from duck or chicken eggs into the surfaces of decorative art pieces as a substitute for white pigment. In the early 20th century, Swiss-born Art Deco craftsman Jean Dunand bartered his metalworking skills to learn the technique, also known as coquille d'oeuf, from a Japanese expert visiting Paris. According to art historian Felix Marcilhac, Dunand was the first to use tweezers to apply crushed shells to produce a 'white craquelure effect'. 'When you see it in person, it is just candy,' said Mr John Gachot, an interior designer who worked on the former West Village home of fashion designer Marc Jacobs. He was referring to Jacobs' circa-1925 Dunand side table, which sold at Sotheby's in 2019 for US$131,250 (S$170,000). Almost exactly a century after the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts – the show that gave Art Deco its name – opened in Paris, Dunand's legacy continues. In January, British company de Gournay unveiled Dunand, a gilded silk wallpaper whose angular, speckled pattern and brassy sheen allude to his metalwork and eggshells. With glitzy, geometry-loving Art Deco re-emerging in contemporary home furnishings, the technique is proliferating. De la Vega's eggshell millwork can be found in a New York City pied-a-terre and an entryway closet in a condominium in Aspen, Colorado – both projects of Ms Kaitlyn Payne, principal of interior design studio Basicspace in Portland, Maine. Ms Payne pitched the relative rarity of the decorative finish, assuring her client that she would not find eggshells saturating her Instagram. 'This is something that is handmade and translates as such,' she said. 'It's almost like you're buying an art piece.' And at US$450 a square foot, you kind of are. De La Vega Designs also produces a mirror collection, called Jules, rimmed in patterns of champagne bubbles, conga lines of triangles and unravelling checkerboards created by the meticulous positioning of shell shards. Britain-born designer Alexander Lamont, who is based in Thailand, first sold items that he described as looking like 'a sort of miniature shattered porcelain' in 2005. Four years later, he brought an expert from France to train his artisans to produce coquille d'oeuf pieces in-house in Bangkok, which were officially introduced in 2012. Among the results were the company's Pleiades vessels, embellished with solar nebula, constellations and moon craters in eggshell and abalone. Each Pleiades vessel takes up to 50 hours to fabricate and is priced from US$2,000 to US$8,000, depending on the design's intricacy. A patchwork-pattern cabinet the company recently produced as a one-off required 350 hours for the eggshell application, followed by 320 hours to apply and sand five layers of lacquer. A marketing executive for Alexander Lamont d eclined to disclose the cabinet's price for publication, but said the company sells 40 to 60 eggshell pieces each year. Other applications are less rarefied. In an undated image, shell fragments were set in resin to create a flat disc, which Yellowdot founder-designers Dilara Kan Hon and Bodin Hon fitted with cables to make a light fixture. PHOTO: OZAN GUR VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES Ms Dilara Kan Hon and Mr Bodin Hon, founders of Yellowdot, a design studio in Hong Kong and Istanbul, began working with eggshells while sitting out the Covid-19 pandemic in Turkey. Undertaking projects that minimised food waste, they saw 'quiet beauty and potential' in the material's light, translucent characteristics, said Mr Hon, who has a background in bioengineering. The couple set the shell fragments in resin to create a flat disc, which they suspended by cables to make a light fixture with a mesmerising pattern. 'There are so many different ways to cook an egg, but no one ever thinks about the eggshell,' said Ms Kan Hon, who studied fine art and interior design. They have blatantly called attention to it by affixing a brass tag to the hanging lamp announcing that it was created with 63 eggs. A room divider boasts of incorporating 480 of them. In an undated image, Gobstoppers No. 45 is part of a series created by New York City artist Tina Scepanovic. PHOTO: BLACK AND STEIL VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES New York City artist Tina Scepanovic began working with eggshell lacquer seven years ago while studying at the Isabel O'Neil Studio on the Upper East Side. Some pieces in her Gobstopper series – grids of jawbreaker-like spheres arranged on a wall panel – have textured surfaces created by broken shells glued in place, then embedded in lacquer. For another Gobstopper, she used vinegar to strip the color from brown eggshells, turning them pink, and set the pieces in Venetian plaster. 'It is fascinating how eggshells are simultaneously fragile yet incredibly resilient,' she said . 'Eggs contain calcium carbonate, the same mineral found in marble, so in a sense, they are just thin sheets of marble. They also seem to resist abrasion, and sanding them by hand is a real workout.' She played around with grinding the shells, giving up after finding the results lacklustre. A piece by Los Angeles designer Caleb Engstrom, who uses eggshells to create and embellish. PHOTO: OF STUDIO VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES But Mr Caleb Engstrom, a designer in Los Angeles, has gone full throttle with his coffee grinder. For his limited-edition Special Damages dining chair, he glued dozens of crushed brown eggshells to one of the legs. The sandpaper-like texture is not 'in your face', he said, but invites a closer look at an unexpected detail. Though he applied a clear sealant to fix the granules, Mr Engstrom warned that they tend to slough off. 'It's not for everyone,' he said of the Special Damages chair, which will be on display from May 17 to 19 at the Jonalddudd conceptual design show during New York Design Week, in a new fair, Shelter, on West 26th Street in Manhattan. NYTIMES Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.