London Design Festival 09: Czech designer Maxim Velčovský of Studio Qubus presents a collection of objects covered in mineral deposits at Mint in London this week.

Called Underground Souvenirs, the objects are covered in a film of sediment as a result of being submerged in a mineral-rich thermal spring in the spa city of Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic.

Velčovský has used the process to transform items including a typewriter, lantern, and camera.

The collection is on show at the gallery as part of an exhibition called The Escapists, organised in collaboration with author Max Fraser, who identified the escapists as one of four London design tribes in the London Design Guide 2009 (see our previous story).

The exhibition continues until 27 September.

Photos are by Martin Chum.

More from Velčovský:

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Underground Souvenirs for Mint
collection by Maxim Velcovsky/Qubus studio

This experimental collection owes its existence to natural sedimentation of minerals on the surface of various objects.

Each of them has been exposed for some time to the effects of mineral springs.

This immersion took place at a site where a legendary thermal spring erupts from the earth.

The spring, rich in minerals, bubbles out of the depth of the Earth in the spa city of Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad), Czech Republic.

A leaf from a tree falling into the spring where it flows into a river turns into stone. Just like in a fairytale!

This natural process of wrapping objects into a veil of sediment was an inspiration for my new collection entitled Underground Souvenirs.

Water covers the object with a film of minerals, as if the object lied hundreds of yards deep under the sea level for aeons.

Symbolically, the objects, sculptures and various still life sculptures become the fossils of their time, waiting to be explored and examined.