Amor de Madre manufactures everyday, functional, aesthetically simple products free of superfluous elements. A good example of this is his polyethylene Encanal chopping board. At one end of this, the two corners fold upwards to form a channel down which the food can be tipped tidily into a saucepan without spilling off the sides (as often happens with conventional chopping boards). Another is the eco idea, ComeBagAgain, a stainless steel container for holding rubbish bags; it’s designed for recycling plastic supermarket bags rather than for holding new bin liners.
According to Perera: ‘The catalogue of Amor de Madre consists of pieces which spring from a personal idea. We like to them to have a message which is sometimes ecological, sometimes humorous. All our products can be read in two ways. A major advantage of Amor de Madre is that it has allowed me to sell our ideas to other companies. In our view, for an object to function well in the real world you need to consider other criteria besides aesthetics. But this is something we designers often overlook because design schools teach us to how to design but not how to manage the production of an object.’
Amor de Madre products can be found mainly in northern Europe – especially in the Netherlands and Denmark –but also in Germany, France and Portugal. Most of the company’s orders come via the web.
Perera has collaborated with many companies, notably Camper, Délica and Mago Group, and with such design studios as Stefano Colli Arquitecto and Novell Puig Design. He also teaches at various design colleges including Elisava, EINA, ESDI, IDEP and Lai, and has assiduously participated in a number of conferences and workshops on design.
Amor de Madre’s products have been exhibited in group shows all over the world. Recent exhibitions include Re-frame at the Ivan Dougherty gallery in Sydney (in 2006), Transformer at Milan’s Galería Opos (also in 2006) and at the Young design festival of Seoul (2003). Other designs of his, like Comebagain, are now in permanent design and recycled design collections at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Barcelona.
Perera’s oveararching objectives are to ‘modify a piece’s materials to make it more ecological, to focus on distribution and to produce about five designs a year.’