The Wintermute Turntable was manufactured completely from waste reclaimed singular source –
“Tiny’s Green Shed” a local waste procession facility located in Canberra.

 

The central goal of the project was to highlight the potential of reclaimed materials through the creation of a contemporary consumer product.

The secondary goal of the project was to conceal the origin of the materials used. In doing so, emphasis could then be placed on the reclaimed materials superior performance rather than that of the virtue of being simply “from waste”.

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To achieve this, the object would need to demonstrate high levels of functional performance, precision and novelty. A “high-end” product such as a record turntable was chosen as an appropriate vehicle to meet these criteria.

The process of creating the resulting object,

 

The Wintermute turntable, followed a cyclical process of design, forage, select, adapt, reconfigure, assemble. For example;

 

A tonearm is required to be rigid, low resonance and be incredibly light weight. As such, a carbon fibre golf club shaft was selected as a “donor”. It was machined to specification and assembled.

 

A plinth should be high mass, inert, electrically insulative. As such, 51 t-shirts were laminated into a Micarta billet, then machined to shape.

 

And so went the production of the 80+ parts of Wintermute. Drive belts from wet suits. Air bearings from medical crutches, a wiring harness from broken headphones.

This process delivered an object of honest and dignified function, free from the weight of resource consumption.

 

A non-disposable product born from a multitude of disposed products.

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Sam Tomkins. 2019