Iris
Barber Osgerby
Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby founded their London studio in 1996 after graduating with Master’s in Architecture from the prestigious Royal College of Art in London. Their diverse body of work spans industrial design, furniture, lighting and site-specific installations, as well as gallery and public commissions such as the London 2012 Olympic Torch and projects for the Royal Mint.
Named for the circular, coloured rainbow in classical Greek mythology, Iris features five tables, each with its own radiant colour spectrum.
Each table in the Iris Limited Edition series is constructed from a single geometric component, which is machined from solid aluminium to an extraordinary level of precision and repeated to form a perfectly tessellated ring.
Colour is integral to the design of the Iris series. To achieve the deliberate and exact variation of colour needed for each composition every segment is individually hand-dyed in anodizing tanks. Machining the segments from solid aluminium is the only way to enable the anodizing process as cast metal does not take on the colour in the same way.
The composition of colours, whether a gradated run or series of sharp tonal differences, has been handpicked by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby to capture the beauty of the colour chart in a three-dimensional form. Using circular forms means that the colour patterns are continuous with no starting point and no end.
Barber Osgerby’s work is held in permanent museum collections around the world including London’s V&A Museum and Design Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2007 they were awarded Royal Designers for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts and in 2013 the duo were each awarded an OBE for their services to the design industry. Both hold honorary doctorates of art and lecture internationally. A definitive monograph of their work to date, titled Projects, has just been published.