Sunday Sketchbook
It’s been a week of highs and lows in the studio this week, so I’ve included something to calm, something to inspire and something on the reason I love craft and do this in the first place. Happy Sunday, I hope you enjoy!
Max Richter + Yulia Mahr
This is a beautiful video to start your Sunday morning, a collaboration between composer Max Richter and artist Yulia Mahr, it’s called Mirrors. This is the first single from the VOICES 2 project, inspired by and featuring text from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Watching the flower bloom while the beautiful contemplative music plays is the perfect moment out when lockdown fatigue hits.
Yinka Ilori + Circular by Design
I’ve had a fair few pieces of furniture off the street myself so this project really resonated. For his ‘If Chairs Could Talk’ exhibition Yinka Ilori used abandoned pieces of furniture to create beautiful and valuable objects for a public gallery space. He’s interviewed for Katie Treggiden’s excellent Circlular by Design column here. I save all my waste metal and jesmonite (their isn’t that much from casting) and will be using this as inspiration when the time comes to find a way of using them!
George Nakashima - Woodworker
Why do we make things? I think this something every designer has asked themselves as part of their creative journey, George Nakashima travelled the world in search of answers. His daughter and her cousin have now made a documentary exploring his life’s work and the philosophy behind it. I particularly loved his idea that making a piece of furniture is a continuation of the life of a tree, I think that expresses why craft is such a special way of making objects, the reverence for the material and process that goes into each piece. You can read more here and watch the documentary here.
From The Studio
This is the hardest part of the new collection, working out how to turn things that look great in my head into things that look great in real life. I’ve been doing lots of paper modelling this week, trying out ideas before I test them in the real materials to play with shape and scale. It’s both really exiting and frustrating as things go wrong or don’t work out how I thought. I used to get really down when this happened but with more experience I learned that it was just part of the process, if everything works first time, you aren’t trying exciting enough things!