PERFORATED METAL PLATE/BOWL GOLD RIM

I'm hoping that someone can help me with this item. I bought it at the Salvo's about five years back. At the time I was collecting metalware of various types, but mostly stainless steel. This dish/plate/bowl was different.

Different can sometimes mean good! Sometimes.....

It needed a bit of a clean. There was some 'blu tack' attached and the 'gold band' around the edge looked like it could shine up. So I got out some tooth picks and removed the 'blu tack' goo and used a silver cloth on the band. To my surprise the band immediately brightened with no effort at all! It was not made out of steel it looked like it was aluminium, maybe zinc covered in a bright red enamel.

The pattern of round perforations is called "the 60° staggered pattern" and is the most popular distribution as it offers greater structural strength and has the most versatile range of open area.

"The smallest hole size that is practical to be perforated depends on the thickness and type of material to be used. As a general rule for carbon steel and aluminum, the diameter of the hole should not be smaller than the thickness of the material. As the hole size approaches the thickness of the metal (1:1), the process becomes critical and tooling breakage and quality failures become more and more probable"
http://www.newmetals.com/PDF/perforated.pdf

It's 23 cm in diameter ..... that's 9 inches.

I was rather impressed with it. It looked industrial.
Meccano memories: Frank Hornby in 1901!

I put it on a stand and it looked good on its own: it's see through, a bit blurred, a mesh with a rim. It is no longer bright red. The colour changes.
It looked good with objects in front of it as well. It framed them.

One Saturday morning a few years before I had missed out on an Alessi plate at the Surry Hills market. Someone had sold it to a dealer friend for $20. The visual memory of that plate/bowl designed in 1992 by Susan Cohn Bowl, 'Cohncave', steel /stainless steel was ignited. Susan Cohn is an Australian jeweller from Melbourne. She was the first Australian to be brought into the Italian Alessi design team.

"In Australia’s hot climate food has traditionally been protected from flies by mesh covers and meat safes. Cohn first developed the association between mesh and food with a limited edition of coloured aluminium mesh fruit bowls — the precursor to the perforated steel Cohncave manufactured by Alessi since 1992. Cohn has developed other food-related mesh vessels, both one-off and production pieces, which use combinations of coloured mesh to generate unique patterns."
http://nga.gov.au/Cohn/Pages/Page03.asp

I wonder if .......?

Researching this little tale has brought me new insight into perforated steel and its history which goes back to the 1860's. And then this morning I found a blog that went into influence of Josef Hoffmann in creating objects with perforations. It ends with perforations in Nike footwear and begins with objects from the Wiener Werkstatte 1900.

"Perforated design, then, is an aesthetic, and a pretty unique one at that. It’s our answer to formal embellishment, or undecorated decoration. Rather than tacking things onto an object, as one would with clay sculpture, this handling is purely reductive, like carving marble. In the case of perforated design, the object itself is the decoration."
http://designthug.tumblr.com/post/2618438559/holey-sneaks-the-very-abbreviated-epic-journey-from