A ‘Salon de the’ Summer

I attended many art openings, tamer affairs than the club and gig nights I’d been used to during art school, with plenty of free-flowing, cheap Bulgarian wine. One such opening was a show of furniture and sculpture by Tom Dixon, Mark Brazier Jones and Nick Jones, who went on to form Creative Salvage. The pieces were bits of scrap metal welded together; junk recycled into objects. Their slogan was ‘never leave a skip unturned’. In spite of being made from ephemeral materials with little craftsmanship, they were compelling as works of art and had a raw energy and anarchic quality. I bought a piece I particularly liked for £25, titled ‘The African Queen’s Throne’. Tom dropped it off at Rococo the next day, and was amused at the juxtaposition of the rough metal object with the pristine white marble floor of the shop and the pink cherub interior. One day I suggested Tom make me a fancy swivelling office chair. On delivery, Tom joked that I was the first person to have bought two things from him, which made me his first Patron. We had the idea of turning Rococo into a Salon de Thé and gallery space for the summer.