LONDON.- British designer Simon Hasan, recently highlighted by Wallpaper Magazine in their 2010 UK Fab 40, is to offer the public artworks at the amazing price of £3. Hasan’s work usually sells for thousands. Industrial Makeshift is an unpretentious antidote to the art market.

Hasan has used the medieval leather-working technique of Cuir Bouilli to mass-produce over 400 handcrafted objects, which can be purchased in the usual coin-operated way from a conventional vending machine.

Selling for only £3, the pieces are moulded on archetypes of mass-production such as cola bottles or anonymous pound-shop plastic objects. Rendered in hardened leather, these symbols of globalised industry become curious artefacts with an almost archaeological quality. All proceeds from this installation will be donated to the Northampton Market Trader's Association.

In recent years Northampton's 700 year-old market has witnessed the nearby explosive growth of high street chains that are part of an automated system of global manufacturing, supply and consumption.

In Industrial Makeshift, the designer examines this evolution through themes of commerce, craft and industry, and explores the role of the handmade within the modern production system.

Hasan who trained under Ron Arad at the Royal College of Art immediately caught the attention of curators, gallerists and collectors with his 2008 graduation show. He’s never looked back.

Each artwork will be individually embossed with a unique reference number and will be for sale at a fraction of the true value via a leather clad, coin-operated vending machine sited on Northampton’s Market Square

Industrial Makeshift alludes to William Morris’ 1894 lambaste of unsatisfactory mass produced goods. In a clever twist, Hasan hand makes substitutes of the very type of ubiquitous engineered products Morris was condemning.