TETRA , occasional table / stool
yelyzaveta rudenok
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Year : 2025
Materials : Hand-carved European Walnut, Recycled Packaging Composite, Olied finish
Size : 18”H 18”W 16,5”D ( H46 W46 D42 cm )
Yelyzaveta Rudenok created the Tetra Series by transforming used Tetra Pak cartons into furniture.The Vienna-based designer pairs hand-carved European walnut with woven strips of composite packaging,creating chairs and tabourets that question what we consider valuable or worth preserving.
Walnut is treated with care, an objectively valuable natural resource. Tetra Pak also comes from wood pulp, but is widely seen as cheap and disposable. Bringing these materials together starts to unsettle that hierarchy, reflecting on consumption and mass production without being overly didactic.There’s a personal layer running through it too.
Yelyzaveta grew up in a context where resourcefulness was part of everyday life.Her grandmother would never throw away milk or kefir packaging, washing and drying it, sometimes turning it into small functional objects. She remembers rows of freshly cleaned cartons hanging under the kitchen ceiling to dry.
She collected many of the materials herself, going into cafés or pulling from public waste bins.The cartons she cleaned, cut, and reworked into sheets, then woven and sometimes reinforced with fabric to push their structural limits.The woven surfaces carry traces of their past life, printed patterns shifting across the walnut frames.What reads as something metallic at first is actually repurposed packaging. Each piece is handcrafted, currently existing as unique works with the potential to expand into small editions.
Yelyzaveta works across sculpture, installation, and performance, approaching making as a bodily process.For her, manual labor becomes a way to stay present, objects shaped through the body and eventually returning to use.
Category : Open Editions
