Charlie White & Tom Fereday's 'Versa' collection transforms waste into wonder

In light of the escalating global climate change phenomena, the issue of waste has surmised a significant role. As human societies continue to generate enormous volumes of trash, we put our ecosystem under considerable stress. One of the many factors that continue to contribute to climate change is our overflowing landfills. An abundance of plastic waste in our oceans, and massive greenhouse gas emissions from decaying waste relentlessly hampers our environment.

As a step towards utilising some of this waste in a sustainable design endeavour, artist Charlie White and industrial designer Tom Fereday conceive Versa, a collection of unique furniture and architectural elements and a collaborative series of installations using 'end-of-life materials.' The meaning of Versa (Latin for ‘turned’ or ‘changed’) is implemented within this collection. From foam offcuts to recycled porcelain, White and Fereday have explored a series of works that render a renewed narrative to waste materials. While being defined by their distinctive oeuvres, they have worked meaningfully towards the 'bigger picture,' of creating products with waste materials.

Versa has been conceived as a transformation of waste material into furniture, lighting, and product designs, encompassing pieces such as seats and tables to lighting designs, that can be applied to floor, wall, and ceiling surfaces. As a whole, the collection aims at expressing a sensory experience by blending opposites—dark and light, soft and hard, sharp and warm. “First and foremost, we are friends. We had been talking about a project where we are creating our individual works but showing them together. We want to create a dialogue together, where there is a little bit of tension between our different aesthetics”, shares Fereday, who is based in Sydney and London.

White has created screens titled 090423 , chandeliers named Cloud, and a modular system of interior objects called Spear. The screens and chandeliers are made with foam waste sourced from offcuts of foam upholsterers and foam suppliers. The objects part of Spear are built from old couch cushions skewered together with steel threaded rods, which are then coated in natural rubber latex. Fereday, on the other hand, has employed materials such as recycled porcelain, hand-cast recycled glass, and recycled cast aluminium to create Layer, a series of sculptural totem lights, Mano, a series of sculptural table designs and Cove, a series of chair designs, respectively. The collection presents upcycled designs whose overall effect is of strolling through several material experiments, each with a distinct function, appearance, texture, and ambience.

To showcase their unique creative processes, Melbourne-based White experimented with waste from an artist’s perspective, while Fereday explored them from a designer’s point of view. Versa is a collection that highlights six well-defined methods of recycling and recovering waste and turning them into usable objects, while also deftly contrasting the efforts and outcomes of an artist and a designer's approach. Each operates within its own reality and moves into the future as two trains running on parallel tracks. The utilisation of waste and discarded materials for this collection leaves designers and consumers with a pertinent question—Is the employment of waste materials a step towards making the product and furniture design industry more sustainability-driven, and is that one sure-shot way we can adapt the necessary need of producing objects, without doing away with them completely?

Text by Ria Jha