Rachel Whiteread designs a silver set for Puiforcat

The silversmiths at Puiforcat are renowned for producing the brand’s flawless mirror-polish finishes, delicately removing microscopic irregularities with sanding brushes, buffing wheels and a soft flannel cloth. So when the house teamed up with Turner Prize-winning artist Rachel Whiteread, who has ‘always enjoyed being contrary’, it was naturally a little puzzled and perplexed at her designs for a collection that displayed deliberate imperfections.

But as soon as the first prototypes were conceived, the silversmiths ‘were eager to realise her approach as faithfully as possible: namely, to create the impression that the objects had been created by chance. And they were especially captivated by the idea that these imperfections were to express a lasting memory.’

Whiteread’s starting point was corrugated cardboard. ‘I knew that the surfaces of the cardboard would transfer well to silver and reflect the light in an interesting way,’ says the artist, who was closely involved in every stage of the fabrication process.

She describes wanting to work directly with her hands ‘in a throwaway accidental and haphazard way that was also highly controlled’, and she initially produced corrugated cardboard maquettes with irregularities that included traces of the material being rolled, folded and marked by movement.

A lot of the development work was done in collaboration with the silversmiths, who, according to Whiteread, once they recovered from their initial bemusement, began to delight in working out how to translate her unconventional designs into silver.

The collection, which consists of two serving trays, two tumblers, a pair of napkin rings and a water pitcher, came about through handling the material and seeing what worked, first by using a mechanical process for the initial silver sheet before manually shaping each object, bending and stretching the metal with mallets over customised mandrils.

The pitcher, the most complex piece in the collection, required the base and spout to be added by hand-cutting the material to follow the undulations as closely as possible.

The handle, corrugated on one side and flat on the other, with a seemingly rudimentary folded top and bottom and a cut and fold for your hand, needed careful consideration to ensure the pitcher could be held when full.

Puiforcat co-artistic directors Alexis Fabry and Charlotte Macaux Perelman share an admiration for both the strength and the delicacy of Whiteread’s work, attracted by ‘her connection with architecture, with the handling of volumes, her feel for materials, and her incursions, all of them brilliant in highly constrained realms, where function is central’.

For Whiteread, the collaboration felt perfect. ‘The workshops were really fascinating – the smell, noise, heat, texture and experience of everything was sublime – fuel for my imagination – I loved it. I felt very privileged to work directly with these highly trained silversmiths. I have always hugely enjoyed being in the workshops of people that make things’.