Michael Kukla

“By drilling and grinding out cellular-like structures, I try to create an organic surface that seems naturally transformed.”

Stunning for their intricately woven caverns as much as their perceived natural appearance, according to their sculptor Michael Kukla these forms are inspired by the act of nature and time upon natural materials. Going beneath the surface the patterns are acheived through grinding and drilling out material – slate, marble or plywood – that changes our perception of it. A Czech born New York resident his pieces illogically interlock growth and decline and play off each other – the different materials only arouse more curiosity for a process that seems to have affected them all.

Tracy Featherstone

Wearable Structure: Inner Core, wood, collage, 32”x26”x32”, 2011

Wearable Structures, by Tracy Featherstone, materialize our daily struggle between control and chaos. The balance is precarious and can tip one way or another in an instant.  Building materials traditionally used to construct living environments or other architectural securities are used in a frenetic fashion.  Quickly, and maybe hopelessly trying to impose order on a situation that is moving out of control.  The traditional role of structure or stability becomes mobile when placed on the figure allowing the individual to indulge in the illusion of stability.  The mobile/wearable element of the work further subverts attempts of control and order.  Similar to the way water will carve a new path around an obstruction, participant finds new ways to move about daily routines in ordinary fashion.

Wearable Structure: Side Bump, wood, 3’x2’x16”, 2010

Wearable Structure: Head Organized, wood and fabric, 2’x3’x16”, 2010

Theresa Duong

 Books Rings by Theresa Duong

Charles and Ray Eames

an original leg splint alongside a sculpture by Ray Eames

nurturing healthy tensions

The journey from leg splints to mainstream furniture was not a direct path.  Ray Eames began by making sculptures out of spare leg splints, cutting into them with a jigsaw.  She was exploring the visual languages that this new material could support, which was a natural mode of inquiry for an art school graduate - apparently playful, but with serious intent.  Within the Eameses' work, two cultures existed side by side, in a healthy tension: the first directly solving problems and respecting constraints, and the second more open-mindedly, even playfully challenging these constraints and exploring further freedoms beyond them.  The plywood furniture arose from both sides, from the splints and the sculptures.

Within design for disability, where teams still tend to come exclusively from clinical and engineering backgrounds, the dominant culture is one of solving problems.  A richer balance between problem solving and more playful exploration could open up new valuable directions. 

Pullin, Graham.  “Design Meets Disability.” Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2011, Introduction.

Pablo Reinoso

 

What starts with an underlying functional form in the work of artist Pablo Reinoso often gets carried away as his furniture pieces begin to take on lives of their own. The crawling tendrils and stretched figures that emerge are rendered all the more exotic by his defiant use of hard wood with soft organic forms. This designer is perhaps most well known for his remarkable wooden spaghetti benches in which the normal ends of wood slats become the beginning of a seemingly living form that twists and turns away from the conventional shape of the bench itself – and just imagine what an outdoor version of this bench would look like against, for example, an ivy-covered brick wall.

Helle Damkjaer

 

The simple color of this contemporary chair design represents the simple spirit of back to nature furniture design philosophy. This contemporary chair design is the contemporary interior item design with smooth finishing furniture design. Kitani is the Japanese furniture manufacturer which manages to bring this good looking furniture design into reality. The designer, Helle Damkjær, calls this design with K-chair. With added little table, the design is called K-chair Plus. The considerable design concept brings this furniture design to become appropriate furniture design for venita kitchen interior decorators.