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Velvet Mango Restaurant

Part 2 Project 1998
Angela Holton
Kingston University Kingston | UK
In the Velvet Mango, we penetrated through a leather doorway to a small carnivorous furry den with a smugglers rescue hatch, which housed cats and dogs and a fattened chicken. In a woolly vertigo of buttons and height, with the kittens I stripped to the flesh and revealed my best as a gastronomic delight. But in deep hunger, I cried out in an endless echo when I reached the pomegranate lamplights of treats only to climb the resin filled fruity stairs to an empty storage cupboard of spattered scattered fruit skins in a conceptual mirrored feast. Starving, I bathed in a fruity shower, caressed in a chocolate velvet bed and ascended to dress and devour in a mashed potato room, overlooking the Thames. The smell filled me and ignited my hungry passion to consume the purity of the potato. The fruit skins were pumped and the potato skins lumped together to ferment and provide sheer bootleg bliss whilst my tummy was filled and creamy and my head, ever so dreamily inebriated.


OBJECTIVE:A climbing banquet of inedible-exotic-fruit-filled-interlocking cantilevered boxes penetrates the skin and bones of a hungry wall. Mashed potato dines alone on the anorexic menu and by fermentation and double distillation through the building’s technology; all rotten mashed leftovers and fruit skins are saved to make poitin at the top of a lusciously montaged installation within the confines of the starving 20m high wall.


COMPONENTS: Feathery toilet, leather zipped entrance, chicken beak wall, sinew tunnel, woolly columns and bridges, lard tiles, pomegranate lamplights, salt and peppercorn stairs, rubber walls, mashed potato floor and window.


TECHNOLOGY: Scented coloured rubber walls are illuminated from beneath and behind. Against the bony climbable external wall, interior edges are smothered in gentle fat pads of scented rubber obesity. Embedded fruit in resin reflects fig flesh wrapped in bubble wrap and satin to soften anorexic footstep.


Indulge in the detailed rotating ceramic plate columns, fruity gutters, illuminated rubber mirror walls and mashed potato windows to prove the feasibility of a new hungry technology.

Angela Holton


Gastronome


The unit was aiming to create a strong sense of place through materiality. It used the narrative film and the menu as allegories for the composition of sequential experiences that created an overall meaning.


Food was seen as especially important as it involves the body physically in its appreciation and uses more senses than the eye. Focussing on it enabled us to discuss sensuality, excess, taste, smell, texture and colour; qualities which are sometimes censored by the puritanism of the eye.


Angela’s project attacks with gusto these preoccupations and more. We admired her use of the computer to create transformations of excessive spaces; her wit in playing with the traditional narrative of the pilgrim, her inventive use of materials and her determination to detail fruit and vegetable as seriously as glass and steel. Finally (which is not possible to show on the drawings) we hugely enjoyed the poitin she gave us all at the crits.


We hope that you will enjoy her work, her energy and her spirit as much as we did.


1998
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