Images by Ligia the Ritherdon Marketing overlord.
Friday is usually a half day at Ritherdon, so Matt and I put our surprisingly refined ‘unorthodox’ approach to powder coating to the test last Friday on 5 large panels destined for exhibition in the summer.
Giving the ‘dead powder’ a second chance to make it to the oven, it was applied to the metal in lashings. Surfaces were thick, heavy, matte, gloss and everything in between. As the dead powder is a collection of every colour used at the factory over an extended period of time, the exact colour codes used for the beautiful and precises regular powder coating jobs at Ritherdon are a distant memory. Instead we get a deeply unsettling range of intense greys, fluctuating thanks to the odd bit of anti graffiti and leatherette finish powder. The heavy textures also cause a kind of surface subsidence, pulling down and drawing out each coloured particle in the peaks and troughs.
This phenomena gives me a real thrill (nerd alert???). The powder does melt to become a liquid surface covering, but each particle retains its individual tiny spec of colour.
The aftermath.
DISCLAIMER: we totally disrupted the usual pristine Ritherdon paint shop for the afternoon. This is not usual factory practice!
