By Gabrielle Kennedy / 07-09-2009

For his graduation project from the Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts, 26 year old designer Robin van Hontem wanted to do something that caught glimpses of the joys of childhood.  “I used to play outside in the woods, fishing and making little houses out of trees,” he says of his own youth spent in Limburg in the Netherlands.

“I wanted to design something that worked like a memory,” he says. “ I wanted to somehow tell a story about how we used to enjoy certain small things but soon forgot how to.”

For Van Hontem, the icon that best represented that fleeting childhood joy was a spinning top, a quintessential toy box gadget.  “It is beautiful, it's global, and such a simple idea,” he says.

The spinning top inspiration was completely internal with no reference or guidance from other designers.  “But there is no such thing as the pure self and of course there are always influences,” Van Hontem admits.

One of Van Hontem’s strongest influences came from the time he spent as an intern with Amsterdam designer Frederik Roijé.  “I really learnt a lot there,” he says.  “But I’m also inspired by other genres like architecture and art.”

The eventual end of this thought process bought Van Hontem to Dancing Vases, a series of tiny vases constructed from a technique called selective laser sintering, which builds a shape layer by layer from a computer drawing – that shape is based on the dance a spinning top takes in its battle to stay upright.  A laser beam is then directed into a 0.1mm layer of nylon powder which it melts in targeted places.  Another layer of powder is added and the process continues thus building te vase layer by layer.

“I have seen other work using this technique and really liked it,” says Van Hontem.  “Mostly it is used for prototyping, but I thought it would work best for my finished product because it is very precise and for me more original than porcelain."

Van Hontem is now taking his Dancing Vases to the London Design Festival where he was invited to participate at Portobello Dock from the 22nd until the 27th of September.  “It’s an event associated with Tom Dixon and they asked me to exhibit, which was a real thrill,” he says.  

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