Marianne Meinema

Old Steel
Artist Marianne Meinema developed a trolleyfor Shell. A small review:

Past Serves Present
During the final phase of the Metamorfose project at Shell Headquarters in The Hague in the winter of 2005, I visited the safe of Shell International B.V. – while wearing hard hat and safety footwear, and accompanied by André Smit, head of Social Investment. There we found the remnants of the old silver tableware that had formerly been used by the Board of Directors. Our purpose was to get an idea of how this historical silver legacy could be embedded in its new domicile: the l’Escargot guest restaurant. I decided quite quickly that the form of the objects would be related to three aspects:

• The shape of the guest restaurant: a tapering cylinder.
• The rudimentary shape of shells, on account of the Group’s early history which gave it its name.
• And to the rotary movement of drillbits symbolising one of the Group’s activities.

Recycling and sustainable development were key concepts in a process that started with conversations, ideas, drawings and designs, resulting in April 2006 in a definite commission to make two trolleys and a lectern (nicknamed ‘Shellters’) and a work of art (entitled ‘Shellshades’). The last-mentioned object was made from the material left over from the first three functional objects. The whole project was given the working title ‘past serves present’.
The first challenge I encountered was the weight of the material. The variety of tableware designs and the practical requirements associated with these articles channelled my thoughts. The shredding of tableware items turned out to be a better solution than crushing them or melting them down: although this makes them unrecognisable (and enables them to be handled in smaller and lighter portions), the patina (i.e. the colour nuances of the various alloys) is preserved, and hence the aesthetic appeal of this antique silver plate. When blended in turn with transparent epoxy (the trays in the trolleys), or blackened (top of the lectern), or whitened (the artwork) epoxy, this process opens up new and intriguing possibilities.