Moa - A chair based on an experiment with industrial hemp

Category: Furniture

Moa is a lounge chair with material driven design focus in which the main motif was the scrapping of natural materials and traditions. During the project I worked with industrial hemp which I tried to process with a new technology in addition to its traditional forms of processing. Finally, the seat was made with punchneedle technology, which forms a strong structure. The furniture structure is made of an ash wood frame. Moa is based on tradition, raw materials and contemporary material culture. The project seeks to embrace and place in a new context the industrial hemp fibre, which has a long history and tradition not only in Hungary but also in Eastern Europe. By exemining the folk traditions and traditional processing, I tried to do material research with the fibre material, so that I could recapture its good qualities. In the experiments, needle felting was selected from several mechanical technologies as an innovative mechanical process in combination with hemp. Although the process can be considered traditional, it is still negligible in contemporary material culture. The process has further enhanced the positive attributes of hemp, such as its exceptional tensile strength and UV filtering properties.