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Lærke Ryom

Furniture designer, Copenhagen 

 Chair In Quilt (2022) is the result of an exploration of the potential within quilt. The familiarity of the material is challenged in the encounter with a furniture piece. As a piece of clothing the quilt wraps itself around the frame creating the shape, aesthetic and comfort of the chair.

Pictures by Peter Vinther

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Candle chair by Sussan Corrales 2023, made for Physical Education III, a group show curated by David Eardley for Pink Essay.

Paraffin, soy wax and cotton string

Emigrating to a new country has been about openness to change, to understand the need of adaptation. The constant variability of the day-to-day has made me more aware of life’s impermanence. In the past, I have focused on how factors like climate and gravity affect objects, for this piece I’m centering on how functionality can bring about physical change. In this piece, I’ve decided to explore the relationship between attachment and beauty, mediated through temporality. By using wax as a metaphor to change, decadence, and memory, I seek to build a bridge between my past, present, and future life.

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Isabel Rower Colored Porcelain Chair 2019 Ceramic 30" x 16" x 17" Colored Porcelain Chair is an investigation of an object being more than itself. Of a chair being a chair but also a chair, a table/ottoman, and a cushion, possessing multitudes of purpose, use, and value. Of a chair being a chair but also a sculpture. Of a sculpture being utile, something supposedly oxymoronic. I have witnessed how there is nothing that isn't moving. How touching is a kind of seeing, and thinking is a kind of kissing. How In the words of the poet Marilyn Nelson “if one has the ear and takes the time, even the front page of the newspaper is laden with sonnets. The back of a cereal box contains songs. Language is an organ, a musical instrument. Which means that even when having an argument we are singing...” (Lewis, Robin Coste. “Broken, Defaced, Unseen: The Hidden Black Female Figures of Western Art.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 10 July 2017) Nelson’s beautiful idea of seeing poetry, or rather the poetic impulse, as pervasive in all aspects of life recalls a thought from Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry. He states how poetry exists in a realm of the virtual. While it is very much real, the act of rendering what is in the depths of the poet must succumb to the bitterness of the actual when attempting to communicate through the harshness of language’s capacity to express. Versus preserving the glimmer of the unreal that is the poem in its most pure truth. Lerner finds that “[he] tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays [his] professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem that the echo of poetic possibility.” (Lerner, Ben. The Hatred of Poetry. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017.) This sentiment I'm sure is held by anyone who has ventured to tangibly realize an idea through the conduit of material, of the unfortunate gap between the original impulse and the thing that now sits before you. In working with ceramics I have never become to accustomed to the embrace of failure that is inherent in making something go from being ‘virtual’ into being ‘real’. I’m interested in exploring these gaps between the virtual and real in forms intended for functional. When does furniture, become sculpture? 

Words and photo by Isabel Rower

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Vitamin-B12-Omega-3 Chair by Duyi Han (2021)

“Vitamin-B12-Omega-3” chair is inspired by the artistic form of classical Chinese furniture such as those in temples and imperial courts. It is completely covered in fine silk, hand-embroidered with the molecular geometry of Vitamin B12 (critical to nerve cells) and Omega-3 (fatty acid believed to be good for cardiac health).

As part of Duyi Han’s “Ordinance of the Subconscious Treatment” collection, this piece is considered a device that records human cultural history. It updates the decorative content of classical Chinese furniture and reflects a contemporary belief in the modern scientific side of (mental) health.

The embroidery is done by highly experienced craftspeople in Suzhou, China. The chair is made by experienced professionals at Duyi Han’s collaborative workshop in Shanghai.

Words by Adorno Design

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Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown 

Queen Anne Side Chair 1983

MOMA: Blending historic and modern styles with references to high and low culture, Venturi and Scott Brown reduced the elegant shape of an eighteenth-century Queen Anne chair to a flattened silhouette in bent plywood. They also designed the “Grandmother” pattern covering the form, which is based on a mass–produced floral tablecloth owned by the grandmother of one of their employees. In his 1966 text Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Venturi countered Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s famous modernist dictum, “Less is more” with “Less is a bore,” an irreverent slogan for the postmodern era.

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