This Meditative Art Installation is Meant to Aid Healing

10 Questions With… Stephen Talasnik

Stephen Talasnik Shares His Latest Work

Interior Design: How did you first become interested in design?

Stephen Talasnik: I grew up in Philadelphia, surrounded by industrial sites: an oil refinery, the Navy shipyard. When I was eight or nine, I entered a competition sponsored by the Elmer’s glue company. Glue was a new product at the time, we’re talking the early 1960s. The project was to make something creative using Elmer’s glue. I had just visited Hershey Park that past summer, and I decided to build an entire roller coaster out of toothpicks. That was my foray into what could theoretically be sculpture. I went to RISD and got a degree in painting, then went to graduate school in Rome and taught myself to draw more intensively through copying traditional Italian Renaissance architecture and figurative sculpture.

Then I moved back to Philadelphia, curating and maintaining a studio practice and commuting to Japan, where I was teaching at a program at Temple University in Tokyo. While I was there, I would travel through Thailand, China, the Philippine, Malaysia, and Korea, and I learned how to build by hand using natural materials, learning the art of building through massless engineering. The most important component to pull out of that was a real passion for bamboo construction, specifically scaffolding, which reminded me of the roller coasters from when I was a kid. So I became very much fascinated with linear structures—not hard-edged linear structures, just gesture-aligned linear structures. It was engineering that got me interested in sculpture, but what I call fictional engineering.

ID: What do you mean by fictional engineering?

ST: Pioneer, a permanent piece I did in Tippet Rise, Montana, which is a timber frame structure, started out as a model. And the model was born from the assembly of various types of triangles. I was taught in a night school class at Cooper Union that the triangle was the most important geometric component in building, and if you could master the use of it, that’s all you need to know. So for the piece, I relied on single frames, similar in execution to a loaf of bread where each slice is a frame, and then you assemble these frames one at a time and then collectively group them. The ambition is to rely on intuition, and that comes out of drawing things over and over again. It’s fictional in that it is void of any reliance on mathematics. It’s just the reliance on the senses of touch, the tactility of the object. It’s a leap of faith, a belief in your own instincts and self-knowledge to create something which is large.

ID: That was the scale of the piece at Storm King, right?

ST: I was invited to participate in the 50th anniversary exhibition, which was my first opportunity to work large and to work out of doors—and also to work with bamboo. My idea was to create a massive glacier-like structure that was indicative of how a glacier might move. It was not about climate change, but about the power of ice as architecture. So I created a large-scale bamboo structure that relied on geometry and triangulation, and it took over the side of a hill and appeared to be wedged into the land. It was assembled with a group of young artisans and it survived for two years. A hurricane came through the Hudson Valley, the piece was covered in ice, there were wind storms, all kinds of adverse conditions, but it did survive.

ID: Do you enjoy these larger-scale projects?

ST: I’m still enthralled with the capacity of intimacy within a work of art, and the idea of how to take something small with the intimacy of a drawing and then make it large. Keeping it handmade, you are in the position to preserve some of the intimacy but monolithic. I don’t want the viewer to be intimidated. I like the idea of, when they get larger, to make them as transparent or translucent as possible. So I’m using materials that are still linear, that enable you to look through a piece and have access to how the piece is put together. I rarely put skins on pieces, although I’ve just recently started adding skins to some of the models.

ID: Why?

ST: In part, it relates to my interest in anatomy. Skin is reliant on bones to give form.  But I realized I could make infrastructure without having any idea as to what the actual sheathing would be, because it would depend upon the material that would be placed in such a manner that it would conform to the irregularities of the infrastructure. You would start stretching the material over the infrastructure and you would find a new form, without a preliminary idea as to what it’s going to look like. And that’s part of the beauty.

ID: What was the idea behind Floe?

ST: I wanted to create the equivalent of a fictional archeological museum devoted to the excavation of a part of Philadelphia. It’s composed of five different units, with the primary part being the creation of a glacier-like structure out of the materials I’m most familiar with. It’s 12 feet tall, and it occupies a space of about 400 square feet in footprint. Accompanying it is a sort of monolithic wall chart, a blueprint of sorts, which is a fictionalized drawing based on charts by cartographers examining the potential flow of icebergs. Ironically, the primary part of that drawing relates to an aerial drawing I did for the creation of the sculpture at Storm King, so there is a connection between the first large piece and very last large piece that I did.

ID: What else is in the show?

ST: There’s a collection of handmade debris, which is the result of a schooner crushed by an iceberg. And there are individual sections of what could be called glacial architecture, which is the idea of how a sculpture might look if it were designed by a computer—it has all the elements of linear structure, but it doesn’t have the skin of an actual iceberg. So there’s the mapping of ice movements, the digesting of this large-scale wood schooner by an iceberg and the crushing of it, and the debris field left out as as a result of the melting of the ice, and then an examination of how icebergs might be built. There’s no digital component, all done by hand by simple, intuitive movement.

ID: We often think of icebergs as agents of destruction, taking down boats, and their destruction by climate change is also a warning sign. What is interesting to you about them as architectural objects?

ST: We’re making something small-scale with the notion that they could potentially be large-scale. Taking something monolithic and putting it within grasp of your hand. And what’s important is you can see a sense of the hand building them. Even in buildings we see in the skyline, we don’t see the hand as part of it. We see the hand that’s part of the infrastructure, but there’s a skin put on it. So what I try to do is expose the possibility of what the infrastructure of an iceberg might look like, put into a language that is contemporary enough to relate to how we create mathematical systems now.

ID: What’s important about the framework of a fictional museum within the actual museum?

ST: The nature of a museum is to compel people to be restricted to a space and look at things they might not normally have the opportunity to. When you’re seeing something you experience out of doors—a tree or a boulder or a mountain—within the confines and intimacy of a room, there’s a different relationship between the object and the human experiencing it. When it’s out in the open, it’s for all to use. It plays a functional role. When you bring it into a museum, you’re denying its functional role.

Also, I’ve always loved museums that are grounded in science. I’m dealing primarily with natural information, and manipulating it, and this museum is large enough in scale to enable the objects I’m making to create a language that connects the viewer to the object. But underneath that, there is something perhaps that might be possibly optimistic, because optimism resides in the education and awareness. Whether we choose to do anything about it is a much broader issue, but it’s triggering the imagination and means different things to different generations. Do you want to bring your child in and say: Well, this is an iceberg, and icebergs used to be things that inhabited the world? A museum affords this almost irrational sense of time travel, because every object is imbued with a sense of connection to another time and place. We collect artifacts connected to humanity, we’re always living with this fascination that an object is a time traveler in and of itself. The context of a museum is important because it enables people of the present to go back, and it also enables them to project into a future.

ID: What’s in your future beyond this show?

ST: I have a show of 30 selected drawings at the Tayloe Piggott gallery in Jackson Hole, with the common theme of fictional engineering. They are all pencil drawings, made over a twenty-year period. And I’m working on a commission for the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., examining their mission and the architecture of its building, which is celebrating its 100th Anniversary. I’ve spent days at the building doing rubbings of all the low-level bas reliefs, which I’m going to use to create a large piece. My passion is building. A problem exists in that I see engineering, or at least the type of engineering I do, as gestural drawing. And fictional engineering is a way of translating the gestural line into a three-dimensional structure. It all came out of the experimentation of an eight-year-old playing with toothpicks to make roller coasters.

This New York Office Doubles as a Contemporary Art Gallery

When the owner of Orange Barrel Media, known for its out-of-home media and smart technology—think futuristic 21st-century billboards—began conceiving ideas for a new office in New York City, fittingly, attention turned to creating visual interest. The owner had an ample, enviable collection of contemporary art he wanted to show off, but the airy, 3,500-square-foot NoHo, Manhattan office was more open-plan than art fair in organization.

Inside Sketch’s ‘Crafted Wonder’ Installation at the London Design Festival

Sketch, the London dining and art destination founded by Mourad Mazouz, celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. Over the two decades, its spaces have been designed and redesigned by such luminaries as Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance, Yinka Shonibare, and Interior Design Hall of Famer India Mahdavi. Sketch also participates in the annual London Design Festival, creating temporary immersive installations. This year’s iteration, titled “Crafted Wonder,” transformed three rooms into boundary-pushing, international examples of the handmade. It began at the entry, where French rug maker La Manufacture Cogolin covered the floor and arches with a golden pattern derived from 1930’s gouache drawings by the late fashion illustrator Christian Bérard. The mode shifted to this century in the bar: Multi­dis­ci­pli­nary British artist Julian Carter forged what he calls a “three-dimensional line drawing” from steel rods. Finally, in the lounge, Czech glass manu­fac­turer Lasvit presented a special gold version of its Herbarium chandelier by Mária Čulenová Hostinova to complement the lush botanical setting.

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.  

Experience Andrés Reisinger’s Groundbreaking Art in Quintana Roo, Mexico

Impression, Sunrise has been credited with inspiring the name of the impressionist movement. Now, more than a century later, that Claude Monet painting from 1872 lends its title to a temporary exhibition of digital art at a 125-key island resort in Quintana Roo, Mexico, fittingly called Impression Isla Mujeres by Secrets. The 2023 “Impression, Sunrise” is a selection of five works by Andrés Reisinger, an Argentinian digital artist, designer, and ambassador for the hotel. “Back in the 19th century, Monet’s style was not appreciated because it looked sketchlike or unfinished,” Reisinger says of impressionism. “But this project feels a lot like that style, and that’s a cool thing.” Reisinger himself is savvy in cool. Not only do his ethereal NFT artworks openly embrace the use of AI but his Reisinger Studio also designed Moooi’s viral Hortensia chair. At Impression Isla Mujeres, his digital pieces such as The Wither, a dreamlike scene depicting an abstract shape on a pink-tinged plain of grass, were displayed on an LED wall at Unik, the rooftop bar, so they synergized with the panoramic Caribbean Sea vistas—and its inhabitants: The exhibition supported the Saving Our Sharks Foundation, a U.S.–based nonprofit organization that uses art to raise awareness for endangered marine species.

Ceramicist Olivia Barry Looks to the Past for Present Designs

Get to Know Ceramicist Olivia Barry

Interior Design: How did you find your way to ceramics?

Olivia Barry: My grand­mother was a potter, and the exposure I got from her lit a spark in me. I took pottery classes from age 10 in Toronto, where I grew up, and then in Ohio, where we moved when I was a teenager. Wherever I’ve lived, I’ve always found studios in which to work.

ID: But didn’t you originally study industrial design?

OB: Yes, at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. Although it’s known for automotive design, it has an amazing and unsung industrial design program as well. Another influence was meeting Wendell Castle in high school, when he was giving a talk at the Toledo Museum of Art. I was really interested in his work and the sculptural nature of furniture, so I pursued those ideas in school.

ID: What is the most interesting thing you learned from her?

OB: To be brave. When Eva lived in Russia in the 1930’s, she was imprisoned because she was accused of plotting to kill Stalin. She survived the Gulag for, I believe, 18 months. And then went on to have an incredible life. Eva did things other people hadn’t done before and she did them seemingly fearlessly. She didn’t worry about what was going on in the design world. I don’t think she really noticed.

ID: How did you end up going out on your own?

OB: I was working for Eva on the weekends or after hours while also making my own ceramics in a group studio in Brooklyn. I’d done prototypes for what is now my Scroll Luminaire, which ended up in the Design Trust for Public Space auction in 2017. People really responded to them—there was even a bidding war. So, I decided to start working on more, moved out of the city, and built a studio in Tarrytown, where I now live.

Peek at Olivia Barry’s Lighting Designs, and More

10 Questions With… Ceramicist Jane Yang D’Haene

2023 is turning out to be the best year yet for ceramicist Jane Yang D’Haene. Having been picked up by The Future Perfect last spring, the Korean-born, Brooklyn-based artist has quickly emerged as one of the platform’s most successful talents. After numerous showcases in the gallery’s West Village townhouse in New York, The Future Perfect mounted Yang D’Haene’s first solo show at its Los Angeles Goldwyn House earlier this summer. Occupying various rooms of the sprawling Hollywood Hills mansion, the “Remembrance” exhibition comprises over a dozen one-off works that demonstrate the latest feats in her ongoing exploration and translation of the ancient Moon jar typology.

Yang D’Haene’s recent success has also come from partnerships and projects developed in addition to this fruitful collaboration. A September 2022 group show at Galerie Kitsuné Brooklyn, in partnership with fresh-faced Los Angeles purveyor Stroll Garden, led to Yang D’Haene’s curatorial debut. Presented simultaneously with yet another solo show—this time at Hauser & Wirth’s Southampton outpost—”Where Land Meets Sea,” on view till September 4th, is a thematic showcase highlighting six young Korean artists exploring many of the same preoccupations that have come to define her practice thus far. Staged with Stroll Garden at the studio of late abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb in nearby East Hampton, the exhibition centers on the common thread of interpretation; finding different ways to treat the well entrenched heritage of Korean artistry through a contemporary lens. If that weren’t enough, there are showcases of her work in Paris and elsewhere planned for later this fall. 

The highly sought after ceramicist only began foraying into the medium six or so years ago. She began her professional life climbing the ladder at a major architecture firm and designing corporate offices among other projects. As she shares with Interior Design, her story is proof that advantageous career shifts are possible at any stage of the game. Yang D’Haene also talks about her idiosyncratic process and the thinking behind the three format-defying collections she debuted with The Future Perfect in June. 

Jane Yang D’Haene Shares Insights Into Her Craft

Interior Design: What first brought you in contact with art and design?

Jane Yang D’Haene: I was raised with art all around me. My father is a painter and my grandfather composed music. I grew up watching my mother, who was always making something—sewing clothes for the kids, knitting sweaters for the family; she was also known for her singing.

ID: What led you to the world of interior architecture and design? 

JYD: I came to New York when I was 16 years old. My high school art teacher thought my work was good enough to apply to art school but sadly, my father was very against the idea. That’s how I embraced architecture school. He just wanted me to have a more steady job.  

I ended up studying at Cooper Union, which, to be honest, was extremely difficult due mainly to my language barrier. I was taught by world-famous architects but understood very little of what they were trying to convey. I couldn’t explain all my thoughts but I discovered drawing and model making as the best way to express myself. I always thought ‘If I could only explain everything through my drawings or models, I would be happy.’ I still think this way. I don’t need to explain my work so much and believe that it speaks for itself.

I worked at TPG Architecture; starting as a junior designer and moving up to design director by the time I left. Most of the projects I helped develop were offices for hedge funds, law firms, and advertising agencies. The latter was my favorite type of project to work on—I especially loved the process of designing the Double Click workspace. It was the Dot-Com era.

ID: How did you begin working with ceramics?

JYD: Ceramics came to me by recommendation from a friend in around 2016. I was going through a depression at the time and she pushed me to take a class at a community studio as a way of getting my mind off of things. At first, I really disliked the material—It was messy and as an extremely organized person, It was hard to get into it. After the third class, I noticed that everyone around me was progressing faster than me, so I took it as a challenge to work harder. Before I knew it, I was going to the studio every day. Eventually, the exploration of clay felt like something I could do forever—there was so much I could discover within it. My absorption into the medium proved to be therapeutic. 

ID: What inspired you to focus primarily on this discipline and establish your own studio?

JYD: I opened my Industry City, Brooklyn studio in 2018. I wanted to have the freedom of experimentation with all materials. Early on, pieces were constantly exploding in my kiln, which was a process I could never go through in a shared workshop due to limited time and space. My pieces still explode from time to time as I constantly look to push clay further. It’s what makes me want to go further and learn more about this magical material. Though ceramics quickly became my main focus, I was able hold onto the inherent sense of construction I honed when working as an interior designer.  I understand what can go well together in a space and always imagine my vessels as objects existing in a particular setting.

ID: How has your personal practice and studio evolved over time?

JYD: It seems my work is getting more complicated but looser. I’m using increasingly varied glazing and firing techniques. My internal emotions are expressed much more than in my earlier work but my desire to explore the potential of this material is continuous. In that too, I noticed I am less scared of making mistakes and have even begun to celebrate imperfections.

ID: How has the exploration of making Moon Jars and other historically-significant object typologies allowed you to reconnect with your roots?

JYD: In a way, working with clay brought back a feeling that seemed to be stored in my hands; which made me rethink my personal and cultural history. Over the past six or seven years, I’ve made so many different types of forms but over time, I noticed that I was drawn to moon jars. I wanted to bring my heritage through form and shapes while using the glazing process as an opportunity for expression. 

ID: In what ways does your practice challenge yet honor these traditions, and bring in sense of contemporaneity?

JYD: An evocation of heritage exists in my work, not so much as a stringent following of traditional methods, but more as a representation of memory; the elements that left a deep impression on me as child simply by virtue of being ubiquitous; the things you don’t consciously register but recall with deep fondness when you are no longer surrounded by them. In a way, the work that I do relates to the traditions of my culture, in the way that drawing something from memory relates to the veracity of detail—it might not be entirely correct, but, when successful, captures the vital essence of a thing. My designs serve as canvas that depict these recollections. A contemporary comes with love for and application of experimentation.

ID: Could you share more about how trial and error informs your process?

JYD: My forms are quite simple; I make my own versions of Korean ceramic shapes. Most are handbuilt using a classic coil technique, which is a slow process but one I enjoy. The experimentational factor is always at play, in the material itself, starting with mixing different bodies of clay to achieve an unexpected finish on the surface. I then play with layers and glazes. Dome pieces involve multiple firings and that’s most exciting because I get to be a painter and a mad scientist all at once. It’s always a surprise when I open my kiln. I never get the same result twice and that’s what I find most attractive about ceramics.

ID: What’s the significance of the recent Remembrance exhibition with The Future Perfect?

JYD: I created three new bodies of work for the exhibition, which included my first exploration of ceramic furniture: a series of stools. It felt like a robust moment in my artistic career, one in which I felt the emotional impulse behind these works come through with an intentionality I’ve been working towards for years now. This was also my first time showing in Los Angeles, which was also quite exciting.

ID: How do the new Frill, Minhwa-inspired, and ceramic stool collections demonstrate the next step in your career?

JYD: I think they’re a step forward in a more expressly articulated connection between the visual qualities of the work and its emotional content. While the scaled-up Frill vessels are inspired by giwa—wave-pattern roof tiles found throughout Korean—the Minhwa collection alludes to the tradition of anonymous painting. The furniture pieces carry a sense of weight and gravity that seems particularly uncommon for ceramics.

10 Questions With… Maarten Baas

Dutch designer Maarten Baas and Hollywood may sound like an odd pairing at first but the City of Angels is indeed a fitting background for the creative’s whimsical furnishings and artworks. His new exhibition, “Play Time,” at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Los Angeles taps into his signature notions of time captured through the raw emotionality of a child, as well as the weighty adult consciousness of its unstoppable flow. “Los Angeles for me is about Hollywood and film—a film is a reflection of a story in a virtual world which is exactly what I am trying to do, too,” Baas tells Interior Design.

Today, the 45-year-old designer works from a large warehouse in Den Bosch in the south of the Netherlands with a team of 10 employees, some of whom work at the office and others at the workshop. “I see there as my kindergarten, my playground, in which I can experiment with all the techniques and materials that I wish to,” he says about his studio life.

Designer Maarten Baas Talks “Play Time” and More

Interior Design: How do you approach the concept of play, which also coincides with a time of untamed self expression? 

Maarten Baas: I visualized myself as a child. Of course, everybody once was a child, so we can go back in our memories, but I didn’t want to do that in a rational way. I rather wanted to do so in a “how to stay energetic way,” just really feel the energy of how I was as a child. Maybe, this was a little similar to how an athlete would visualize their race. Before actually going for their Olympic medal, they visualize how they reach the finish line. In this sense, this visualization is a meditation on getting into the energy of a child. Then, I come in a gray zone between my own young self and the actual mature 44-year-old Maarten. The interesting part was getting into this verge between a child and an adult, the period when you get wiser. By growing up though, we lose a lot of potential and creativity. I instead wanted to have the best of both worlds and see if I can reach a level in which I’m still a child, but with the wisdom of an adult. It was a very interesting journey.

ID: Clay is commonly used in play. How do you view the material?

MB: My first work with clay was a series of furniture in 2006. I use industrial clay, so it’s not baked in an oven but it has a synthetic process. I wanted the clay works to look like the aesthetics of a child’s sculpture or a child’s drawing. The clumsiness and spontaneity make the work interesting, maybe give some Art Brut aesthetics, which I really appreciate. I combined the skills of an adult with the aesthetics of a child. I find the idea of making a shape with your hands and keeping that shape as the final object quite beautiful, rather than designing it in the computer.

ID: Your Smoke series perhaps was the first time you implemented this sense of playfulness into design and its processes. Could you talk about how Smoke assumed these notions as almost a subversive method of creation and how you have transformed this approach over the years?

MB: Smoke was my graduation work. I approached it in a way that maybe an adult wouldn’t approach. Burning something has a lot of symbolic meanings, an adult can interpret it as something negative or positive. For me, it’s exciting to burn something and create a new shape and a new layer; there is an adventure in what comes out of the process. Burning also has to do with the curiosity of a child because children don’t demolish something just for the sake of demolishing, but they do it out of curiosity: “hey, can I pull this apart, or, hey, can I burn this?” There is a genuine curiosity that drove me to burn those pieces.

ID: The forms at the new show carry a similarity with children’s drawings—they are liberated from adulthood’s obsession with precision and sharpness. Has it been a challenge for you to free yourself from adulthood burdens while turning the sketches into products?

MB: Yes, it has been a challenge. This is actually a challenge for everybody—life is designed in such a way that we start with a very beautiful world in which fantasy and everything else can live. And for the rest of our lives, we strive for that same freedom while we have a blueprint for how life should be lived. Trying to get back that freedom is a challenge for many people and it requires confidence. This “carrot dangling in front of us carries us forward.” I made this approach my profession to see if I can make a language for myself which translates the thoughts about where and how I free myself from rational thoughts, from criticism, from logics, from expectations. Yes, it’s challenging, but it’s also a nice way of working and living.

ID: Could you talk about your collaboration with children for this show? 

ID: Works like Grandfather Clock and Real Time The Artist strongly flirt with the space of sculpture. Do you have different approaches to works with utilitarian aspects than those that are solely artistic?

MB: I make functional works and autonomous artworks. Function is not always their main part. I think it’s fairly nice if the clocks are running synched with time because that adds a layer of magic—that dependence to 12 hours is a part of the work. If you really want to have a regular clock, you can buy one for 10 euros and you have your time, but it’s not about that. It is about the story that time can tell. Same goes with the clay furniture as well: the fact that you can actually use them is an added layer to the artistic value. I also make works which are not even supposed to be functional. I like to explore as many sides as possible, and function is not the most important one. However, I sometimes receive special requests for functionality in private commissions. Then I take function into account.

ID: Real Time The Artist is also about performance. What is the role of performance in your work?

MB: Performance is indeed an important element. Especially the work The Artist was made for the Venice Biennale in 2019. I am in that clock as an artist, paying. Artwork is evolving minute to minute whileI’m inside the clock. Artists always try to be ahead of time or to reflect the momentum of time. At least that’s how I have always approached my work. I try to be an ambassador of the time we’re living in and how we experience it. But we’re also always behind because time is always faster than us. So this man in the clock is me as an artist trying to capture time. I like telling stories through my work and performance is a very important part of it.

ID: How do you see the clock’s significance as a symbol of time but also for play as an authority of keeping track of time?

MB: The Real Time Series started with the idea that time is something very abstract. Time is everywhere, always there. We are occupied by it subconsciously, all the time we aware of the fact that time is running and we have a limited amount of time on this planet. We try to make the best out of it. Yet still, there’s a suggestion of measuring time or capturing time in a clock, and we have this agreement with each other that a minute is a minute and an hour is an hour. And that’s why we have the suggestion of an idea about a concrete concept of time, but it’s not concrete at all—every minute is a different experience. Every minute, there’s a unique happening with unique moments. And once that minute has passed, there is nothing of it anymore. I like to play with these ideas. All my works are telling a new story about this experience of time and what time means and the fact that time is a human made concept

ID: Brass holds traces of time. How does brass help you convey your statements?

MB: I’ve worked with brass and bronze which are, of course, very sculptural materials. I contrast this with the very naive way of working to turn them into a sculpture rather than furniture. I often develop my own techniques within these materials. Moreover, I liked the effects that I can do with it just aesthetically—it’s a beautiful material to work with.

Maarten Baas: Play Time is on view through May 26, 2023.

10 Questions With… Mia Karlova

Mia Karlova Talks Collectible Design

Interior Design: What is your mission with Mia Karlova Galerie?

Mia Karlova: We live in a moment of great attention to design. I try to use this attention to say something meaningful, to present designers who have an important story to tell rather than just a mere formal and aesthetic concept. It is always important to me that there’s a big story. This is probably what the gallery is known for.

Design is capable of creating a strong emotional connection, and this emotional aspect is essential. At the end of the day, you are spending quality time with yourself in your life, enjoying pieces that surround you not just because they’re comfortable and aesthetic, but also because they’re meaningful. We build our own story every day.

I also give stage to artists whose work articulates a certain ecological consciousness. It is a joint task for both galleries and interior designers to shape taste towards a more sustainable direction and communicate this urgent idea to collectors and clients.

ID: Where does your talent come from?

MK: I am based in Amsterdam and am proudly representing Dutch artists. I enjoy the proximity to Dutch Design Week, where galleries and curators from all over the world scout for design. However, I have a very international roster, with artists and designers from France, the Czech Republic, Japan, Latvia, Russia, South Africa, and Ukraine. I’m visiting not only design fairs, but also art fairs, studios, and graduation shows. There are a lot of them, say 300 events a year. You basically could just travel and do nothing else.

The most important for me in Europe are PAD Paris and Collectible in Brussels. Collectible, which we just finished our third year participating in, is very specific and dedicated to purely collectible design for the 21st century.

ID: Could you tell us about a few stand-out creatives you represent?

ID: Do you believe collectible design is experiencing a resurgence?

MK: Collectible design is definitely at a high point, and increasingly attracting attention from art collectors. You can see how this influences the fair market. For example, Collectible in Brussels is still young, but has already gained important momentum among collectors from all over the world. I’m also a big fan of the design showcase Alcova, held during Milan Design Week. They are doing great representation there.

In May, the gallery will take part in BAD+ Art Fair in Bordeaux, France. This new event, with strong links both to the art world and one of France’s most renowned wine regions, was from the start designed as an art de vivre fair embracing both modern and contemporary art and design.

ID: With collectible design, function sometimes seems less important. Where do you draw the line?

MK: It is true that in the world of collectible design some works are more functional, while others are more sculptural. I leave it to designers to decide what side they want to lean towards. I have pieces which are quite limited in functionality. For example, we have a wooden coat rack made from rose-tinted beechwood by Japanese designer Sho Ota. This object is functional in theory, but it is so sculptural that it disrupts the hierarchy of home objects, elevating a pure technical function to a true minimalist sculpture.

If I see the line developed by the designer, I don’t say no. Sometimes the same designer makes a capsule collection where some pieces are very visually functional, and others following the same idea and line tend to be barely functional, but still very beautiful.

ID: How do you think your childhood influenced your design thinking?

MK: I literally grew up visiting museums as it was a big part of my mother’s job as a gallerist and art historian. Our walls were full of art and our home was full of art conversations. As a teenager, I often worked on the gallery’s fair booths. This was incredible experience which I only became aware of when I opened my own gallery. This world was not unknown—and this is in part the reason why the gallery is positioned to include both art and design.

ID: Who in the industry that you particularly admire?

MK: South African artist William Kentridge. He’s known for using quite varied media, from prints and animated films to sculpture and tapestry.

ID: What are you reading?

MK: Ways of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist. I know this book so well, but I keep going back to it again and again as if to a mantra. It reshapes the role of curator, defining it as someone, who, despite having their own voice, is there to hear and let other voices be heard.

ID: In what kind of home do you live?

MK: I live in what could be called a designer’s house, meaning that designers fully express themselves when it comes to their own homes. My home is inspired by 1980s interiors, with vivid colors, large patterns, and expressive ceramics paired with great freedom of expression. This decade was a time of great freedom in life. My curtains, for example, are by Austrian designer Josef Frank. I also have a vintage faux-fur upholstered chair, produced in the 1970s in the Czech Republic.

ID: Do you have a secret you can share?

MK: Svenskt Tenn is a place not to miss when in Stockholm. It’s a shop with exceptional design and living philosophy located at the same address for nearly 100 years. Josef Frank has created many of their textile patterns.