Flexible Brass Coating

Flexible Brass Coating on an exhibition lampshade

Metalier’s flexible brass coating features on a lampshade made of cotton. The lampshade is a work by Auckland artist Natalie Guy and is exhibited at the Pah Homestead. The exhibition, entitled Parlour Games features works from the Wallace Arts Trust Collection alongside work by four contemporary New Zealand artists.

Natalie, who frequently works with Metalier coatings, said the exhibition was a complicated one. “The artists have integrated their own responses to modern life with resonances of past lives echoing in the Victorian domestic period of the Homestead”.

The Parlour Games Notion

The Parlour Games notion relates to the movement of furniture in the game ‘Musical Chairs’. Natalie made a series of works based on interior furnishings incorporating chairs, lamp-fittings and clocks. These have been transformed into pieces in transition in both material and place. Natalie’s work usually plays with ideas of creating a mix of the familiar and the ambiguous while leveraging a whimsical mid-century aesthetics. In Parlour Games the works take on a double guise as the modernist pieces are given a Victorian slant. The flexible brass coating was specifically used because of its relationship to mid-century interior fittings. The works of the contemporary artists were designed to respond to art –works from the Wallace Art Collection and in this case the work is a painting by Stephan Huesch.

Substrates for flexible brass

The Metalier flexible brass coating was applied to fabric similar to cotton which was stretched across and around the frame of the lamp –fitting. It was carefully finished using our bristle system which allows us to polish areas that are not flat.

Metalier’s flexible coating system can be used on fabrics of many types and even on paper. Right now we’re working on some blinds for Natalie – can’t wait to see how they turn out.

If you’re in Auckland do go and see the exhibition which is open until 26^th June 2016. And if you would like to know more about Metalier coatings, flexible or inflexible please contact us by telephone (Mary 021 732746) or email or by completing the form below.