10 Questions With… Mariah Nielson

The opening of the gallery, which is located at Point Reyes Station in California also coincided with a renewed interest in Blunk’s work in wood and ceramic. Kasmin Gallery opened the artist’s first New York exhibition in 2020, displaying a broad range of material and scale. The same year, a self-titled book was released by the London publisher Dent-De-Leone, and since, Blunk’s work has been featured in group exhibitions at Blum & Poe, R & Company, The Landing, and Anthony Meier. In 2022, Kasmin Gallery opened another solo show to exhibit the largest display of Blunk’s jewelry, titled Muse. In February, The Future Perfect will open a show of Blunk’s work at their Los Angeles space during art fair Frieze L.A.; this spring, Martell Foundation in Cognac will open the first European survey of Blunk, with exhibition design by Martino Gamper. 

How Mariah Nielson Honors the Legacy of Her Father, JB Blunk

Interior Design: Could you tell us how you decided to initiate Blunk Space?

Mariah Nielson: I set up the gallery in June of 2021, which is also when we had our first show. The JB Blunk Estate had taken over the lease of this space in Point Reyes Station in May of 2020, and we originally planned to use it as our archive and storage for online products, and an office. Once we moved in, we realized we had enough room to exhibit some of my father’s work. The presentation of JB’s work in June of 2021 kicked off a series of exhibitions. Then we decided to focus on turning the space into a gallery because it can accommodate shows beautifully. The space has a charm to it: it used to be an old mechanic’s garage, where they repaired cars in the 1940s; in the ‘60s, it was converted into a series of retail spaces, so it has a very broad industrial feel. We painted the whole space white and the floor is concrete. There are beautiful wood beams exposed in the ceiling, and there are really interesting angles because of the way the space was chopped up back in the ‘60s.

ID: As the curator, how do you select the exhibiting artists? Do they have to be responding to your father’s work in a way?

MN: The focus of the gallery is JB’s work and the artists from his circle. There are also contemporary artists and designers with links to my father’s work. These are artists who are inspired by his work and in some cases have spent time at his home or have perhaps been looking at his work from afar. Everyone who exhibits has some connection to JB’s practice and is referencing his work in some way, whether historically or in a contemporary way.

ID: Remembering Kasmin Gallery’s Chelsea show of JB Blunk’s furniture, sculpture, and jewelry in 2021, scale is an important element in his work. How does this element of unity between large and small pieces come together in gallery shows?

MN: I love a mix of scales and mediums—that blend of mediums is really important because that’s what my father did on a daily basis. In the summer of 2022, we had a show of large paintings by Jack Wright, as big as we can fit in through the door basically. Last year, we also had large tables and this exquisite redwood mirror in an exhibition of Charles de Lisle and Rick Yoshimoto. We fit the mirror through the door and it looked fantastic, and we called it “The Magic Portal.”

ID: JB Blunk was also heavily influenced by Japanese ceramics. Are you interested in exhibiting Japanese artists and designers at the gallery?

MN: Sure, we had a show of Rick Yoshimoto, who is Japanese-Hawaiian, and in late 2021, we had the ceramic exhibition, Mingei to Modern which included a number of Japanese artists. We have exhibitions lined up next year and into 2025 with Japanese artists, and “100 Hooks” includes quite a number of artists from Japan as well.

ID: How influential is your previous curator role at the Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco today? There must be an emotional element to running a space under your father’s name but does your previous experience influence it in any way?

MN: The museum really trusted me when they hired me to be the curator because I was an architect and I didn’t have a lot of experience working as a curator. I was running the JB Blunk Residency out of my father’s home when I began working at the museum. That said, I had curated shows with the artists and residents and had a bit of experience in terms of bringing work together and organizing a show. But the museum really gave me a chance, which I’m extremely grateful for. What I learned working at the museum was how to put a show together from the beginning to the end, with all of the logistics: How to manage a team, how to do the lighting, or the exhibition text, which was all a great foundation.

ID: The gallery’s previous show with Martino Gamper and Adam Pogue had a humorous element. Gamper’s work feels inspired by the Italian Radical movement of the ‘60s. How did you end up inviting them for a show?

MN: I met Martino in 2008. I helped him curate his design is a state of mind show at the Serpentine and actually lived next door to him for quite a few years in London. I was looking forward to the chance of having a show of his work at our gallery, and there is such a strong connection between his work and Adam’s, as well as my father’s. Martino has been looking at my father’s work for years and is deeply inspired by the home. I am really happy with this pairing.

ID: Obsession, I think, was an element in JB’s work in terms of materials, process, and scale. I see a similar thread in Gamper’s work with his “100 Chairs” project and your current “100 Hooks” exhibition.

MN: The obsessive and the playful qualities in Martino’s work are absolutely in line with my father’s work. There is also the interest in working with salvaged materials. Martino’s “100 Chairs” are those he found on the streets of London, and my father’s salvaged wood comes from up north. They both took what others considered useless and transformed them into something absolutely beautiful.

ID: Function and art are mingled in a mysterious way in JB Blunk’s practice. How does the “100 Hooks” exhibition represent this?

MN: There’s always this element of surprise in JB’s work. What can you do with a hook, which is an object that’s ubiquitous and typically overlooked? How can you create something or play with that typology and create something that’s actually the center of attention?

10 Questions With… Furniture Artist Caleb Ferris

ID: What type of pieces do you make?

CF: Sculptural furniture and objects that are inspired by the fantasy of everyday life.

ID: What inspires you about the fantasy of everyday life?

CF: I’m inspired by objects and motifs that exist in the background of our lives. I have a growing reference library of objects that I pull from. My collection ranges from things like fishing lures and pasta to cartoons and Sci-Fi movies. There are so many genres of collections to explore that we don’t often associate with the design world. My hope is to broaden the perspective of where we find beauty.

ID: Why pasta—what’s the appeal?

CF: The answer is twofold. I found that when you first share your design with someone, their immediate response is to associate that object with something that already exists. It can be one of the most humbling and annoying experiences (heaven forbid your work is compared to another designer’s). I want to control this narrative and beat my audience to the punchline by being conspicuous about my sources of inspiration.

The second half to my answer is that I went to the grocery store frequently during the pandemic. I’m not sure if it was the lack of travel or stimuli at that time, but I had an ‘aha moment’ in the pasta aisle one day. I stood there and started examining all of the varieties and noticed how each type of pasta was engineered to serve a purpose and how sculptural they are. The rest is history.

ID: How do you fabricate your pieces and what are some of your favored materials?

CF: The majority of my work is carved wood. I fabricate using a combination of hand and digital carving depending on the scale of the project. I really like the collaboration between man and machine in these processes. I think it’s a good reflection of the lives we live today. However, in an act of rebellion, I started incorporating imperfect hand-made elements into my work as a way to reclaim the humanity of making a physical object. I accomplish this through spontaneous finishing, which showcases the materials and processes as part of the final piece.

ID: What was your breakout design?

CF: The Noodle Throne, which I debuted this summer during NYCxDesign.

ID: Dream design project?

CF: Somebody please call me when we start furnishing our homes on Mars.

ID: What does a typical day look like for you in the studio?

CF: I spend probably 85% of my time doing some form of sanding. When I’m not sanding, I like to make sketch models by hot gluing random things together or tying them together with wire and string. This is my favorite part. Once I have a concept that I like I digitize it and refine until it resembles a piece of usable furniture. 

ID: What’s one thing you can’t live without?

CF: Quality snacks are essential to the creative process. The seriousness of the snack is directly related to the scope of the project.

ID: Who is another designer’s work you admire?

CF: I admire the work of the artists who were part of the Dada movement. I particularly like [Marcel] Duchamp’s ready-made works. I resonate with the idea that a simple object can be completely transformed via the artist’s definition and context with little alteration to the object itself.

Unique Martin Puryear Sculpture Debuts at Storm King Art Center

Martin Puryear is perhaps best known for sculpting in wood. (His Bling Bling, which stood sentry at Madison Square Park in Manhattan in 2017, was 40 feet of laminated plywood.) But that may be about to change: Lookout, his site-specific commission debuting this fall at Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York, is his first work made of bricks. And there are a lot of them: At 20 feet tall and 16 in diameter, it’s built from some 18,000 red-shale bricks without any formwork. It’s a feat of materiality and construction that took Puryear, Storm King artistic director and chief curator Nora Lawrence, plus a team of architects, structural engineers, kiln builders, and brick and cement technologists nearly a decade to complete, using a Nubian vaulting technique that was developed centuries ago in the Upper Nile delta of Africa, where Puryear’s ancestors may be from. A 9-foot-high archway allows visitors full immersion with Lookout; once inside, they stand on a floor of reclaimed cobblestones and bluestone, chosen by Puryear for both their commonalities and differences with the brick. Light filters in from and views of the grounds are visible through any of the sculpture’s 90 round, different-size openings, which were formed by the insertion of glass fiber–reinforced concrete tubes, the bricks cut to fit around each tube. “The experience has been an adventure and a challenge,” Puryear says, “a series of puzzles to be solved and a collective effort.” Details of this experience as well as that of the making of the artist’s other pieces are on view through December 17 in “Martin Puryear: Process and Scale,” Storm King’s accompanying indoor exhibition, where most of the 22 maquettes are made from Puryear’s old friend, wood.  

10 Questions With… Kostas Lambridis

At Kostas Lambridis’s Athens, Greece, studio, there is a corner for everything: A wood corner takes up space, as does one for working on metal, in addition to others for plastic, electronics, ceramic, and glass. There is also what he an his team of six call “the dirty room,” where they do sanding and painting. All these fragments of materials inhabit the Greek artist and designer’s practice, which kicked off around five years ago after he graduated from the Contextual Design department at the Design Academy of Eindhoven.

After cooking up his talents at Nacho Carbonell’s studio and debuting a solo show with Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery in Paris in 2021, Lambridis has recently opened his solo U.S. debut, titled “Reverse Fireworks in Slow Motion,” at the gallery’s midtown location in Manhattan.

The nine works in the show assume witty approaches to furniture in the age of rapid technologies, environmental crisis, constantly evolving forms of self-fashioning, and visual data influx. The crux of the presentation is a singular playful focus on different materials such as plastic, metal, mineral, and wood, while stretching the narrative limits of usable art. All you need now is some oxygen is the show’s tour-de-force, a flamboyant stage-like coffee table made out of concrete, glass, ceramic, marble, each interjected into the overall work with a commitment to elevate their characteristics. A wash of fungi and flora in ceramic blankets the bottom of the table, roofed by hefty cuts of glass and marble with concrete accents. 

“My time at the Carbonell’s studio is forever a part of my design DNA,” Lambridis says. “Working there made it possible for me to even imagine that I could have a life built around this way of working, producing these weird, ugly furniture pieces for a very specific market.” Today, the 35-year old works from a large second floor studio in a northern suburb of Athens, which was inhabited by Greeks who left Turkey in the early 1920s and turned the area into a commercial hub for carpet-making. “My dad grew up in this area so I immediately looked for a studio here when I moved back to Greece,” he says, and just like the materials in his sought-after objects, his studio team is composed of artists and artisans from different backgrounds, all tasked with taking turns making meals inspired by their native cuisines.

Kostas Lambridis Talks Design, Found Objects, and More

Interior Design: What is your relationship to minerals?

Kostas Lambridis: I consider minerals to be the starting point of what I’m making. While I was producing my thesis piece, elemental cabinet, six or so years ago, I separated the materials I was using into five big families, which are minerals, metal, wood, plastic, and textile. Then I realized none of these was accurate because in textile, for example, I also include leather or printed surfaces. Today, by minerals, I refer to base materials, so I consider concrete to be a form of mineral, as well as clay or glass because their starting points come from the earth. For this show, I decided to stick to one family of materials for each piece instead of mixing all different types together. There is, for example, a low table which I made out of stones I found or bought from different places.

ID: Could you talk about construction and composition? As a designer, you’re physically constructing an object but as an artist, there is a composition. 

KL: I would say sometimes composition comes first. Structurally, I am looking for the way to actually make the piece strong and hold it there. But sometimes there is the opposite happening. In other cases, I just let the structure that is hidden to speak up and come up on the surface to become the protagonist. It’s a dialogue between composition and construction.

ID: How do you source and use objects you collect? 

KL: This is a natural part of the process. I drive around with my car, usually going from home to the studio, and I see all these things on the street. I always stop to see what people throw away, and if I can imagine some kind of use for that thing, I just put it in my car to bring it in the studio. That object might stay there for five years before it becomes useful, or it can be used the same day. All you need now is some oxygen, which is a wooden dining table for 10, for example, has many found objects, especially on the surface of the upper table. The things I found on the street in a way guided the form of this table. Found objects are always treated with the same way as all the other materials that I have in the studio. Maybe that is also why there is a balance between obsession and randomness.

ID: Are you interested in the histories of found materials? They come with some history through people touching and utilizing them—they carry the marks of those processes.

KL: For sure I am, but I don’t necessarily pursue this information, although sometimes this information just comes to me. I might make up a story, or just fill in the gaps with my imagination. On top of the wooden dinner table, fused before charred, there is a space that is carved, which I split into different pieces, and we use them to different sides of the table that has the illustration of someone being on an elephant in the jungle. There are trees, and few rocks. This, for example, I interpret as a reference to the forest, the source of the material of the wood. I believe this part of the table was made somewhere in Indonesia, or Malaysia but I bought it from a secondhand shop in Athens. I think maybe a couple went on a honeymoon trip in that part of the world, and they came back with this souvenir, which sat in their house for years.

ID: This also makes me think about the element of humor, which comes with some curiosity and an invitation to think out-of-the-box about furniture.

KL: For sure. I like to do things that somehow will make people feel uncomfortable when they look at them or things that are just considered to be totally wrong. The dinner table, for example, has a bumpy surface which will be hard to clean after dining on it—I was actually laughing with my studio team while making this table. I like to approach making a work with practical questions like this that challenge its use. 

ID: The idea of bringing different materials together also hints at a form of storytelling. All these details come together to unfold a tale, almost like pages of a novel.

KL: This narrative is very open-ended—everyone can project their own version because there is no specific narrative that I had in mind during the making. There can even be multiple and conflicting narratives. Maybe this is also something I use to justify my choices to myself although there are elements that I consciously use together because they have a kind of connection through a specific narrative if you will. But, I’m more interested in things that I unconsciously do. When I look at the result later, I realize something about myself, maybe something I was not even aware of in a metaphysical way.

ID: I’m also curious about pace, not only due to the show’s title but also because it looks like your process takes time, demanding some slowing down while focusing on a singular material.

KL: My practice, even more than the result, is about whatever is happening during the making of these works. It is a choice to spend my time making them at the studio with the people in my team. In the end, we, like everyone else, all pay attention to what we do with our time. I want to spend my time creating these objects, so this is the first choice above any aesthetic or artistic choice.

ID: There are nine works in the show, which can be considered a modest number for a solo debut in New York. Did you create the works knowing that they would be exhibited here?

KL: This was not a specific choice although I showed nine works in my previous show, too. There are nine works but actually there are 10 pieces because the bar stool work includes two seats. My process is open to change so I might start with an idea and end up somewhere completely different. There are pieces that I agreed with the gallery that I never produced or there are pieces that just came up along the way. But yes, generally speaking, they were made for this show with this space in mind.

ID: How was your experience in Eindhoven as a Greek person who grew up surrounded by the relics of antiquity and ancient history? We could say the Greek and Dutch aesthetics are quite different—maybe represented in the former through marble and brick in the latter.

KL: Yes, I grew up in Greece, in Athens, but not everything in Greece is made out of marble. Today, the culture is so mixed and global, and so is the market. In Eindhoven, there were things that were more difficult for me than stepping out of one material. Eindhoven was completely rebuilt after it was destroyed during World War II, and Athens on the other hand is, yes, full of ancient marvels but also surrounded by modern buildings made in contrast with humble materials.

There is something about the Dutch that I really appreciate, which is having everything in order, unlike Athens, which is where I choose to live and work. Ideal balance perhaps would be something between these two cities.

Erwin Wurm Unveils New Works at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

10 Questions With… Ceramicist Ludmilla Balkis

Ludmilla Balkis’s sanded stoneware vessels made their New York debut in Guild Gallery’s recent solo exhibition for the French ceramicist, titled “Stasis.” Loosely constructed, like cloth deliriously flapping in the wind, the medium-scale sculptures contain mystery and process with their allusive yet energetic formations and textured surfaces that brim with traits of oxidization. Voluminous bodies throughout the show’s 26 pieces are not coincidental for Balkis who left a career in fashion behind for sculpting with clay. After working as a fashion designer for Céline in London with Phoebe Philo, she decided to pursue her interest in textures and forms through the promise of the pottery wheel. “The history of clay is so ancient—it made me aware of living in connection with the environment and human history,” Balkis tells Interior Design. “It gave me the opportunity to manifest the homogeneity between nature and human beings.”

Here, Balkis shares insights into her creative process as well as her works featured at Guild Gallery and those in “A Summer Arrangement: Object & Thing at Long House,” an exhibition in East Hampton, New York ongoing through September 3, 2023.

Interior Design: Folds are an important part your aesthetic. Could you talk about the resonance of folds?

Ludmilla Balkis: I’ve always been so attracted and intrigued by folds, ever since I discovered them in paintings from the Renaissance era through to the 18th century. The static compositions with these almost moving fabrics were really fascinating to me and was an ode to the virtuosity of the painter.

Isadora Duncan is a woman who really changed the perspective of wearing garments while dancing, representing a route to alternative practices that encouraged physical and personal freedom. That was a tipping point for me, where folds appropriate a deeper meaning and which could be imbued into the clay: freedom and movement. Two essential elements folds offer the sculpture.

ID: What is your relationship with clay? As a sculptor and someone who comes from fashion where sculpting is a crucial part of the process, how do you appropriate its softness?

LB: My relationship with clay while it is soft makes me want to create a relationship with space. Space as an emptiness is a notion we tend not to pay attention to, but clay allowed me to understand it in a very pragmatic way. Space became as physical as the clay when I started with this new material. In a manner of speaking, sculptors sculpt the space around them and dig in the empty space that finally becomes physical. I feel that everything is possible when the clay is soft, as long as I respect its drying time and mailability. It gives me multiple ways to expand the relationship with emptiness.

As a fashion designer, the body was always the central piece and of course the space around the body became a second protagonist before the fabric. In both instances the intention is the will to freedom, freedom of movement.

ID: In this direction, unlike fabrics, clay resonates with firmness. How was your process of adjusting to the irreversible and stubborn nature of clay once it dries?

LB: The relationship with clay had to become neutral at first and no comparison was to be made if I wanted to understand its process. So, I had to make many mistakes in the beginning and the biggest one was to be constantly trying to anticipate the outcome, but I quickly understood it was necessary to start understanding that clay was a way of interacting with the earth to which we will all return. It was a cathartic moment for me to understand I needed to be in contact with my inner self in order to manipulate the most primordial material and not fight with it, but dance around it with my hands. As a neophyte I was stubborn, but the clay quickly taught me to be humble and my approach developed into highlighting the natural roughness of the clay, to invoke this deeper meaning.

ID: Stoneware is the shared material in all pieces, but some sculptures also include iron stain, wood ash slip, iron oxide and other materials. This makes me think of painting, too. How was your approach to each sculpture as a blank canvas?

LB: I tend to let the clay guide the volumes and once the sculpture is finished, I go with my instinct and would either blow oxides on the dry piece and observe to see if it needs another layer of wood ash or any slip. Each clay has a different way of responding to a certain approach. But I generally focus on the spaces around the individual pieces and their mutual interaction which helps me think of an overall idea. My palette stays really simple and earthy as I like to obtain a result that makes the piece invisible in nature, as if it belongs to it.  I started to observe the shape of things in my everyday life as I moved closer to nature and by mimicking some shapes or textures. I would tend to dig into all the references I’ve accumulated over the years, like we all do as observers. In other words, I never feel that the canvas is blank. I feel like the canvas is actually full of references and one needs to be quiet the mind in order to allow the shape to guide.

ID: There is a desire to turn to natural materials and colors in industrial design and fashion today. Do you see a parallel between two sectors in terms of this desire?

LB: I believe the essence of our species now is to survive in a natural world that we have been severed from. This desire to use natural materials, I hope, is a universal one that might signify our desire to reconcile with nature, albeit subconsciously. To use natural materials is not something new but getting back at it is certainly a way to start this reconciliation process.

ID: The hollows render the sculptures somewhat biomorphic, giving them energy and character. Could you talk about your crafting each piece as figures with personalities in a way?

LB: The dialogue I install with each piece is very much induced with my meditative state. The meaning of biomorphic comes from combining the Greek words ‘bios’, meaning life, and ‘morphe’, meaning form. By giving life to an abstract form, my intention is to collaborate until its final shape and I tend to give each sculpture the importance it deserves. Attention to detail and using a certain tool will evoke a certain personality trait. Dancing around them while shaping them is a great way for me to allow the movement to take place; a piece will look like it’s been shaped by the wind. For each piece, I tend to work towards the same goal: demonstrating that humanity and nature are one.

ID: How did you reach the decision to quit the fashion industry to pursue object-making? Could you talk about the moment when you realized this shift is indeed possible?

LB: I realized I wanted to slow things down and take time to process my surroundings and felt the urge to be in sync with nature. My health got bad, and getting pregnant forced me to reconsider the fast-paced life I was living—a frenetic preoccupation that kept me from facing what was important to me at the time. So, this mindset led me to the desire to avoid making merely obsolete objects, but rather to get to the core of making things, creation.

Like a primordial instinct that kicked in, the process made me connect more profoundly to not only myself, but also our ancestors.

ID: How did moving to Basque Country influence your creativity? Do you think you’d be making the same work if you lived in Paris?

LB: That’s interesting as I started in London and moved back to Paris where my work continued to evolve. I must admit moving to the Basque Country allowed me to make bigger sculptures as I physically have more space to work. It’s also due to the image of grandiose nature that this place offers me every day. The mountains and rivers and the ocean are so wild and rough here. It’s atomizing yet it allows me to express myself on a deeper level. I don’t think I would have been able to create the same work in Paris as I feel more pressured there and also distracted by museums and galleries. Moving to the Basque Country and learning about a new culture that is so ancient and rich gave me other dimensions to explore, new ways of thinking and creating.

10 Questions With… Creative Director Porky Hefer

For Porky Hefer, neither artist nor designer fit as a label. “Designers used to call me an artist and artists call me a designer,” he said. Rather, he identifies as a creative director. Hefer, who has no formal training in design, says his creative process isn’t technical; however, for more than a decade, he has brought to life avant-garde works inspired by nature. While his designs are conceptual, three-dimensional forms; Hefer’s envisage of biomimicry is spontaneously powerful. His mission is to uncover what exists beyond the ever-present human gaze and explore the visceral lives of animals, organisms, and life forms is why he started his brand Animal Farm, and later founded Porky Hefer Design.

Hefer’s recent solo exhibition, “Volume IV. Chaos Calamus – Interspecies Reciprocal Altruism,” at the Southern Guild in Cape Town, South Africa centered around unraveling the existence of amoeba. His works on display explored how the creatures interact with their symbiotic nature of movement. To illustrate this idea, Hefer radicalized different materials, including wood, rattan and leather, displaying them in an oversized form during the course of the show, which commenced April 20, 2023.

Interior Design: Where does your career story begin?

Porky Hefer: I started out in advertising, and then direct marketing and internet advertising started coming. Digital advertising really destroyed our budgets, and also the whole system. [Hefer resigned from that job and started his own advertising consulting agency, Animal Farm.] Even then, we had products that you couldn’t really say anything about. So I decided I should be designing products that I know are different, and that I can sell. A lot of furniture design is based on trends and capitalizing on trends and following trends. I was very lucky because in South Africa, it is difficult to do product design because you don’t have a mass market like you do have in Europe or the east. I arrived at the same time as limited edition design, which was far more interesting for me. Also, just the right time with meeting Kevin and Judy from Southern Guild so we managed to get into quite a strong place quite quickly, as opposed to other areas where South Africa has to compete against an existing group of countries or people who are dominating a design scene. In limited edition design, it was basically free for all.

ID: How would you describe your entry into the design world?

PH: It felt accidental though also natural. My wife was into design, she’s from Turkey, and she introduced me to an international flavor as opposed to being merely South African. It was 2010 when I really started getting it right. And that was with Southern Guild at the Johannesburg Art fair. I did my first presentation with them there and realized that I had to have a good piece in order to stand out amongst artists. That’s when I came up with my first name. My benefit from advertising is that most product designers come up with a product—that’s what their skill is. But I can come up with a concept, think about the target market that I’m trying to reach, and where it’s going to. I consider my context. I think in a way that’s more like an advertising brief rather than a job where I make a product. It’s a story: Where does it go? I’m trying to create something which is a lot more conceptual, I suppose, which is closer to art.

ID: Why are you so drawn to create architectural designs inspired by animals?

PH: As a designer from Africa, your immediate reaction is to delve into those parts of culture which are different to the western world and the northern hemisphere. It’s amazing. But then slowly, as this sort of appropriation movement got momentum, I started questioning myself and my source materials and source inspirations. So what I realized is that the one culture that’s always been around me in South Africa, has been access to nature. And that’s something that I had from a very early age. We were always on a farm, always with wild animals or tame animals. I was always interacting with animals. And I realized that that’s the thing that is strongest inside me as a South African—my connection to animals and wildlife and nature. So I very early on focused on that. As you master the elements and the land and the animals, then you start to tune into this system and start understanding and seeing it more, and respecting it more.

ID: The texture of your works make it seem like there is an unearthly inspiration, is that true?

PH: Yeah, I’m glad you do think that; I’m a big Sci-⁠Fi fan. I read that when early Sci-⁠Fi started, people made things up because they didn’t know anything about the moon—they had no information about other worlds. They went into nature and started studying it and seeing social interactions—the way ants work in an ant colony, for example. That’s where they got their source material for the future. I had an amazing reaction when someone came up to me said: “I love your work, the thing is that I can’t identify where it’s from. It looks like it’s from another world.” For me, that was the biggest compliment I could ever get. Because, yes, that’s what I’m trying to do—to illustrate the world beneath us and also in front of us that no one looks at. We’re so continually obsessed with humanity and human achievements that we rarely understand how amazing the little things are that go on in every tree. I’m glad that “you’ve never seen it before” comes around, because after advertising, I got obsessed with trying to be original as opposed to derivative.

ID: Your aspect of materialism is so vast and elaborate. Do you intentionally flirt with different materials to relevantly make a piece whole?

PH: Yeah. I mean, what I’m trying to do is vernacular architecture, which is using stuff that is available around me. I work with the materials that are available around me and I think that’s more important than trying to stick with certain materials. I’m not the master of the skills that I work with. I can flirt with other materials. I can flirt with other techniques, because it just means me looking for the right person to make it rather than me having to learn how to make it. It gives me a lot more freedom in doing what I do.

ID: In your most recent exhibition at the Southern Guild, what inspired the chaos calamus?

PH: I always like to put Latin in because people then take it seriously. So Chaos is two parts. Chaos is an amoeba. It’s the biggest form of amoeba that’s around in the universe. The pieces are oozing as opposed to just being a straight circle, they’re starting to probe art with fingers—moving art into other shapes. So it’s about the movement of the amoeba. The amoeba is like the master shapeshifter. It can change the structure of its body and move in any direction. It evolves. So for me, that’s mind blowing.

And then calamus is the material that I use. It’s an incredible material from one of the most aggressive plants in a forest. It can grow from the bottom, where it’s very dark. In the forest that it grows in, there’s no light coming through the top because the trees are so big and closed. So this plant goes straight up in order to get its light. It’s an incredible plant. And I’ve come back to it now because I realize what an amazing material it is. It’s a natural material and there are not many people in the world that are using it.

ID: There is a weaponry of forms in the chaos calamus; are all of them seemingly to the likeness of amoeba or did you sort of want them to look nestlike ?

PH: Yes, all of them. But, I mean, it’s just a snapshot in an amoeba’s life. But for me, I want to feel like they’re moving. Moving, always changing. You never know if it’s the same one or another one. But I think also a big point was working with Adam Birch on the wood pieces, going back to a nest. It does give the feeling of a nest. Whenever they draw a nest in an old scientific illustration, they have to chop off the branch. And that’s kind of the image that I wanted, those sort of old fashioned illustrations of bird’s nest, when they sort of segment the branch so they can fit it in the page. Normally, my work is suspended, and I always try to experiment. Every time that I do something, I want to explore another avenue to see if it reveals anything. And this one was the wood. When it’s suspended, people think that it’s a toy, they think it’s for children, it’s a swing. They treat it rough. But in most situations, art and sculptures or statues are put on podiums. And they put them up and make them more important. This was my attempt to see what happens when I root to the ground and make it a far more typical sculptural form.

ID: How long did it take to make this piece and how will you describe the process?

PH: We did it from September to February. Four months. The process was amazing. Somebody that works with me said: “Wow, that’s one of the first processes you’ve ever been through without a single fight.” I really do work with people for their strengths, not for their weaknesses. Most people focus on people’s weaknesses and say, don’t do that. Don’t do this. Mine is more like, wow, that’s amazing. Go for more of that. It’s a far more positive thing where people are also expressing themselves. I give them that room to move and to do what they do, sort of a support, a balance to everything. And that’s my job as a creative director—to give people the responsibility, but also to ensure that it’s what you wanted in the first place.

ID: What has been your biggest challenge?

PH: Clients. I think less and less, not working with the client one-on-one. You’re working with a representative who is always second guessing or trying to predict or something. For one project that I did, which was a building in Namibia, working directly with the client was incredible. The project could be so organic, it could change as we built as opposed to in a normal situation where you have your building plans and your architectural plans and you can’t stray from those plans. That’s a very limiting factor in architecture, that approval processes on a sort of country level but also on the personal client level.

It’s difficult when people say they don’t understand where my work is from. It’s even harder for someone to buy that because when their buddy says: So why do you buy that 20 foot hippopotamus in your lounge? The buyer needs to have a good story. If it’s something that people recognize, it’s an easy story. Since my works are based on life forms, they are easily recognizable. I work with another lowest common denominator—nest, animal, puffer fish. It’s a very simple point for people to understand and then talk about it. That’s why children end up being my basic market. They [see a nest] and say ‘nest.’

Multitalent Adi Goodrich Talks Film Sets, Furnishings, and More

“I was a working-class kid who stumbled onto things with random jobs,” she remarks. Looking at her client list, which includes Apple, Google, Headspace, Instagram, Lavazza, and Lyft, we should all be so lucky. Goodrich proved as exuberant in conversation as in her work when we asked her recently about her enviably colorful career.

Get to Know Adi Goodrich, Cofounder of Sing-Sing Studio

Interior Design: You describe yourself as a “spatial designer.” What does that mean?

Adi Goodrich: It checks multiple boxes: designing a set, an installation, or a sculpture in a public place. I build worlds for photo shoots, commercials, and film.

ID: Window dressing brought you to L.A. How did you get into set design?

AG: Within a day of my moving here, a guy who had studied with the same teacher in Paris as I did sent me a script, and we formed a film collective. I’m addicted to storytelling in design so building sets felt good to me. Our 13-minute film, Red Moon, hit the festival circuit, which led to commissions for commercials, like a campaign for Lavazza that incorporated costume design, a custom espresso-cup chair, and the use of bold colors and shapes. In 2016, I went to UCLA Extension at night to study interior design and architecture, and now I’m getting into interiors and furniture.

ID: Its ice-cream and terra-cotta colors, distinctive materials palette, and use of pattern seem inspired by Gio Ponti’s mid-century Italian style.

AG: Yes! My other favorite inspirational artists and designers include Josef Albers, Jean Arp, Merce Cunningham, Charles and Ray Eames, Alexander Girard, and India Mahdavi. We recently completed our first office project, two floors for iam8bit, a media production company, which we made into a playful space meant to promote collaboration.

ID: Tell us about your debut Sing-Thing furniture collection.

AG: I wanted to create pieces my friends could live with. They’re handmade here in L.A., primarily of cherrywood and colorful high-pressure laminate. I like to say, ‘Picture a wet Sophie Taeuber-Arp painting that’s fallen on top of a Charlotte Perriand table’—that’s the essence of the collection.

A Monograph Spotlights Ceramic Artist Peter Lane’s Large-scale Architectural Installations and More

The work begins on the floor. Together with a team of five or six assistants, ceramic artist Peter Lane lays down a field of clay, several inches thick. Then this huge slab is sculpted using hand tools, marked out into a grid using a laser, and cut into modular units. These components are then separately glazed and fired. Metallic leaf, white or yellow gold or perhaps palladium, is selectively added. Finally, the work is installed on a wall—Lane conceives each composition as site-specific—and asserts itself as complete and monumental, a hybrid of art, craft, engineering, and architecture.

Peter Lane Finds New Possibilities Within Established Forms 

One of the keys to Lane’s success has been his ability to achieve both con­sistency and variation. His work is immediately recognizable, with its charac­teristic deep relief textures and gilt spheres. Within his well-established vocabulary, however, Lane is always finding new possibilities. The most obvious variable is his glazes, which he makes up from scratch. These range widely, fully exploiting the chromatic possibilities of minerals like cobalt, manganese, and copper (Lane describes the extraordinary interactions that occur in the kiln as a sort of “fast geology”). The grid that Lane imposes on his material landscapes is also important to their effect. This is a practical necessity, of course—tilework has been executed in this way for thousands of years, to enable manufacture, firing, shipping, and placement—but Lane infuses this basic format with an unusual degree of sculptural interest. Patterns of striation, perforations, or accordion folds (the latter suggested to him by a wooden washboard that he saw in the gift shop for New York’s Museum of African Art) move across this regular backdrop, like melody lines swerving over a bass line. The grid almost—but not quite—disappears under the biomorphic tide.

Lane’s largest commission to date—an interior for the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris—was completed in 2017. Working with Minassian and architect Aline Asmar d’Amman, he created the walls for the hotel swimming pool, which adjoins a spa area and lies underneath a courtyard. Skylights provide daytime illumination. This was part of a major renovation of the 18th-century building, which happened to proceed at the same time as similar projects at the Ritz Paris and Hôtel Plaza Athenée. As Architectural Digest noted at the time, “Unlike that of its competition, which hewed closer to preservation, the aesthetic here has gone from preserved-in-amber ancien régime to a streamlined opulence that feels very of the moment.”

A Glimpse of the Artist at Work  

Working on such high-profile commissions, and on residences for private clients (including celebrities like Robert Downey, Jr., who commissioned a sculptural fireplace for his house in Long Island), puts Lane in a rarefied cultural echelon. Yet in so many ways, he is a totally unpretentious person. Lane is hands-on in the studio every day, working almost entirely with clay, which is after all just a specialized kind of mud. This all-but valueless material will be transformed through a long succession of alchemical procedures, then sent off into the world, where it will enact yet another transformation, infusing blank space with a perfectly calibrated mood and physicality. Like all successful artists, Lane aims higher all the time. But his feet are firmly planted, standing on solid ground.

Pooja Pawaskar Investigates Negative Space Through Her Wood Sculptures