Bowling Arm®

 

Fashion Accessory

Year - Launch 2000 - ongoing

Distribution - World wide

Team -

  • n+1 equals (Charles Anderson & Simon LeAmon).

  • Packaging and branding design: Sean Hogan (Trampoline)

Bowling Arm® is a bangle or bracelet made from the leather off-cuts produced in the manufacture of Australian cricket balls. This ‘rubbish material’, in industry called pre-consumer waste, is usually thrown away to become landfill.

As an operation, Bowling Arm® intervenes in this normal product cycle, to delay, detour and re-position. Making ‘something’ out of a ‘nothing material’, Bowling Arm® is, however, more of a re-arrangement than a made thing, and as such, is just as much an exercise of recontextualisation and story telling as it is one of recycling and sustainable practice.

Part of the delight of Bowling Arm® is its materiality - its colours and textures, its wearability and adaptability to all body sizes, genders and ages – and part is its multiple eccentric forms. However, a large part of Bowling Arm’s appeal is as a wearable story and as a story teller. That is, as a product, Bowling Arm® also produces. The story of Bowling Arm® is that of its product life cycle, its transformational process not only as material but also in its exchange value. Thus, what we wear when we slip Bowling Arm® over our wrist is the story of the genius of capital.

However, the story that Bowling Arm® tells is of another economy altogether, of a different rate of exc hange – a social, libidinal economy. This is in the many personal stories and memories the material evokes, and the many personal stories it provokes.

These are the stories of Bowling Arm® being divided amongst a group of friends, of single bands being exchanged at first meetings, after first dates and first nights; of being tokens of affection and souvenirs of memorable encounter.

In this way, Bowling Arm®, as gift, memento and talisman, simultaneously traces the ephemeral architectures of Eros, and establishes the soft-networks of encounter, sociability and communities of shared story.

Bowling Arm® was first distributed through Issey Miyake stores in Melbourne, Australia and has gone on to be distributed throughout Australia and the world and has been presented in exhibitions in Tokyo, London and Melbourne.

Exhibitions -

  • Unexpected Pleasures: The Art and Design of Contemporary Jewellery London Design Museum, United Kingdom, and National Gallery of Victoria, Australia. 2012.

  • Hybrid Objects, Australian Embassy & IDEE, Tokyo, Japan & The Melbourne Museum, Melbourne, (as n+1 equals). 2002.

  •  Doubletake: Recycling in Contemporary Craft, Australian National Touring Exhibition. Craft Queensland, Brisbane; Craftwest Centre for Contemporary Craft, Object-Australian Centre for Craft & Design. (as n+1 equals). 2001.

Media -

  • Susan Cohn / Glenn Adamson / Liesbeth den Besten, Unexpected pleasures : the art and design of contemporary jewellery, Rizzoli, 2012.

  • Mimi Xu, ‘Wrist Spin’, n+1 equals profile, Australian Style, No 60, March 2002.

  • Fleur Watson, ‘n+1 equals Profile’, MONUMENT Architecture/Design Magazine, Australia,         No.46, 2002.

  • Stephen Crafti, ‘New pitch proves popular for fashion with balls’, The Age, Today Section, 22/11/01

  • McMillan, Kate & Jirasek, Ivana (eds), Doubletake: Recycling in Contemporary Craft, Exhibition Catalogue, Craftwest, Centre for Contemporary Craft, 2001.

Links