The latest edition of the exhibition platform Project Materia at 3 Days of Design sees designers and artists transform recycled materials made by design brand Mater into sculptural furniture.

The exhibition, on show as part of the annual design festival 3 Days of Design, follows on from last year's edition, when designers revisited the Renaissance with pieces made from bronze and marble.

This year, Project Materia, which was founded by design platform Tableau and art brand Edition Solenne, instead looked to the future in a collaboration with Mater.

"The idea of Project Materia is that we want to investigate how artists and designers use different materials," Tableau founder Julius Iversen told Dezeen.

"Last year, it was some of the oldest materials in the world: glass, bronze, marble. Now it's some of the newest materials in the world."

The Matek material used for the show comes from Danish brand Mater, which works with upcycled and circular materials.

"Most of the materials we have here [are made] with e-waste – all the plastic from phones and laptops, which is the fastest-growing waste stream," Mater's head of marketing and sustainability Trine Mark Egeberg told Dezeen.

"It's mixed with coffee-shell waste, so that's the fibre, and sawdust from wood production," she continued.

The studio also has a biodegradable material made from sugar cane, developed at the request of designer Patricia Urquiola when she worked with Mater on the Alder collection three years ago.

At Project Materia, nine designers worked with Mater's Matek material, which comes in the form of flat sheets, to create whatever they wanted without a brief.

"Every time I work with architects, designers, artists, I trust them," Iversen said of giving the creatives free rein. "That's the point."

He pointed out that working with a sheet material "was already a difficulty for a lot of the designers, because most people work with organic shapes".

Among the pieces on show were the Stria candleholders by designer Sophie Dries, who glued different-coloured Matek sheets together and then used a lathe to shape them into rounded candleholders.

Also creating more organic shapes was designer Lea Colombo, whose rounded Atom stool referenced sacred geometries.

Designer Willem van Hooff, meanwhile, designed an "ode to the archive cabinet" for Project Materia.

"I chose to make an archive cabinet, which is an object I love, where you store your little drawings or your ideas at home," Van Hooff told Dezeen.

"It's also dying because we don't have physical storage anymore – more digital storage – so they don't make the cabinets anymore, even though I really, really like it."

Van Hooff found there were some limitations when creating his archive cabinet, which is decorated with carvings of things that are important to him, due to the size of the sheets.

"But now they have bigger sizes, so they are expanding that already," he said. "And they have different colours, which I really love to work with."

Project Materia also featured designs by Cathrine Raben Davidsen, Onno Adriansee, Jacob Egeberg, Forever Studio, Filippo Andrighetto and Oliver Thygesen.

Earlier, we rounded up 13 unmissable exhibitions during 3 Days of Design and spoke to Iversen about his projects on show.

The photography is by Adam Katz Sinding unless otherwise stated.

Project Materia is on show at Købmagergade 3, 1150 Copenhagen K from 10 to 12 June during 3 Days of Design. Dezeen Events Guide offers a guide to the festival plus more events and shows around the world.