Laura-Jane Atkinson is a Manchester based designer-maker specialising in handmade interior accessories that challenge and re-appropriate the known application and behaviour of often under-celebrated materials. Her development process is rooted in design by making, allowing the personality of materials to drive the nature of sampling.
Laura-Jane Atkinson’s studio was launched in 2017, completing its first product range of interior accessories, LINO Lab. All of the products are driven by the potential of the under-celebrated qualities of Linoleum flooring, one of the most environmentally clean surface materials, yet largely replaced by vinyl flooring – quicker, cheaper, brighter. For this project, Laura-Jane worked with Forbo flooring and their Linoleum flooring product, Marmoleum.
Linoleum is crafted from rapidly renewable resources, linseed oil, pine resin and woodflour, yet there is now only one UK based manufacturer remaining. Laura-Jane’s product range disrupts the familiar associations of Linoleum as a flooring product by re-appropriating it to craft – a context that is deeply rooted in its production but rarely noted in its mass-manufactured setting. Laura-Jane says, “By transforming this industrialised product into something intimately social, the products celebrate Linoleum’s malleable personality. LINO Lab calls on you to unlearn Linoleum – betray the familiar, shake it off. I am bringing Linoleum back into interiors from a different perspective.”