Japanese designer Rikako Nagashima looked to ink stains on printer paper when creating this abstract curtain collection for Kinnasand that addresses the problem of waste.
Presented at Milan design week, which takes place this year between 9 and 14 April, the SCRAP_CMYK collection features streaks of uneven colour based on the patterns found on scraps of paper leftover from the offset printing process.
"When producing graphic materials, scrap papers – which are called yaregami – are produced during the printing process," said Nagashima. "We used the ink stains on them as a motif for this textile collection."
Nagashima came up with the idea after observing the sheer amount of inky paper leftover at her graphic design studio in Tokyo on a daily basis.
"When we run the printer, the printouts are inevitably blurry at the beginning. Usually, we perform an initial run until the printer gets stabilised by feeding paper to absorb excessive inks," she said.
"We have a large stock of yaregami at our office. So we picked out some attractive colours and shapes out of these, which we scanned and used as the basis to create textile designs," she explained.
The fabric used in the collection is made of recycled polyester produced from plastic bottles. Each piece is printed with irregular repeats of a rectangular pattern and features vivid accents of blues, pinks and yellows.
These correspond with the cyan blue, magenta pink and yellow of the CMYK colour model used in colour printing.
According to Nagashima, the collection aims to demonstrate that "design can result from waste, and waste can result from design".
"When I first visited Salone del Mobile in Milan, I found it splendid but I was very surprised at the same time. The fair was full of novel ideas but I realised many of these would be thrown away after the fair, resulting in a great amount of waste," she said.
"Because our textile designs are created from ink stains on yaregami, I thought it would be nice to use fabric also associated with recycling."
The SCRAP_CMYK collection will be presented as part of an installation called Scrap and Reprint at Milan design week.
The installation will see the Kinnasand space transformed into a giant offset printer with three pairs of elevated cylinders and a year's worth of scrap paper from Nagashima's design practice seemingly fed through it.
Also on show at Milan design week is an exhibition presenting the work of 21 designers and craft makers from Norway and a micro home that can be configured into 20 different layouts.
Scrap and Reprint is at Corso Monforte 15, 20122 Milan.