For Dubai Design Week October 2016, Penniman will be presenting as part of a group exhibition with Tanween chapter two of a story that began earlier this year at Dubai Design Days 2016: the Coral Story. There, with her Coral I Room divider, she explored the incongruous use of coral (a precious, intrinsically beautiful, natural rock), as a building material used traditionally and historically in the UAE. In this next chapter, Coral Sun, she reveals a different aspect of the poetry of coral.

Coral has an internal and external relationship to time, which leaves its mark visibly and fundamentally in the material itself. Coral begins life as a compact colony of living animals, one polyp living and growing on top of another in a cycle that after long periods of time gives rise to the rock we find today. Eventually, the dead coral detached itself from the reef and washed up on the sea shores, all along the UAE, where it was collected and put to use as one of our earliest permanent building materials.

As with any material, coral is a physical manifestation of time: time is embedded in
its intricate layers of pattern and geometry. Over time, coral rock, removed from its natural habitat of the sea and exposed to the desert elements, transforms itself. In the desert,
time, sun, sand and wind make the coral rock bleached and brittle. Eventually abandoned (at least as a traditional building material).

For Penniman, this coral is a powerful reminder that this region is a site of con uence - between man and nature, between sea and the desert, between sun and the passing of time.

By recycling and repurposing this abandoned material, Penniman seeks to reintroduce the coral remnants into a new phase of time, recalling its past in all its natural glory. With this new chapter she takes the light bulb as a metaphor for time, directing its light through the translucent geometry of the coral - the protagonist of this story. In a limited series of lamps and wall sconces, Penniman intends to exhibit the dualistic nature of the coral material, one that is extremely resilient yet delicate and ephemeral.

Organic, inorganic, still natural.

Throughout her design process, she tested the physical limitations of the coral rock. Much to her astonishment, the complex web of polyps and colonies in the structure of the rock allowed it to be sliced to thicknesses of just a few millimetres. As light passes through these thin slices of coral, the dense rock becomes translucent and lace-like in appearance. Time, it would seem, lends the material both its strength and fragility.