We discovered Cave Collective by way of their jewelry, which we spotted at the boutique No. 6 in New York, this past October. In late November, we shot founders Cat Lauigan and Alex Wolkowicz in their Greenpoint workspace. Then, by the end of January, we found out that they’d dismantled most of the studio and jewelry line, that Lauigan had relocated to California, and that both artists were focusing on their individual practices until they figured out what to do next. And yet by that point, we knew enough about Cave Collective to take the news in stride — ever since Lauigan and Wolkowicz began their collaboration in 2010, it’s been an endlessly shape-shifting and exploratory project, one that’s seen them living thousands of miles apart for nearly as long as they’ve lived in the same city. Even their jewelry, stocked in stores like Bird, Need Supply, and at one point Anthropologie, has always been more of an experimental art practice than a proper business.
When the pair first met, in fact, neither of them had even dabbled in jewelry. Lauigan was making large-scale graphite drawings of things like crystals and mountains while living in Oakland, while Wolkowicz had traveled there from her home base in Liverpool for a residency with the LoBot Gallery, where she installed a tree impregnated with broken glass. “Friends introduced us, and we just clicked,” recalls Wolkowicz, who joined Lauigan on an impromptu photography road trip to Pescadero Beach before heading back to England. “We started pen-palling with this dream of doing a project together, sending ideas and images back and forth.” The Pescadero trip became a collaborative zine, the zine inspired the duo to try jewelry as a potential mode of working together in a new medium, and the jewelry became part of a larger artistic universe they began itching to construct together. The following year, they pitched an idea for a joint residency at San Francisco’s Headlands Center that would incorporate the drawings, the sculptures, and the jewelry, plus the costumes and sound compositions they’d begun making as well: “We envisioned building a healing cave inside which we’d do ambient soundscapes wearing our jewelry and shawls,” says Lauigan. The proposal was rejected, but it gave them both a name and serious creative momentum.
By 2012 the pair had relocated to New York, where they staged their first joint installation as Cave Collective, at the now-defunct Lower East Side gallery End of Century. It incorporated many of the same elements they’d envisioned for the Headlands project, and also marked the launch of their official jewelry line, which married cast-metal elements by Wolkowicz with dyed-fiber ones by Lauigan. “People responded to it immediately, which surprised us in a way, because we were just making things to try and form this bigger world,” says Lauigan. They agreed to make one-off pieces for a few shops, but kept their focus squarely on multi-faceted performance projects involving elements of ritualistic, costumed sound-bowl playing, textile-making, flower-arranging, and live drawing. Despite their temporary hiatus, that’s likely where it will remain: “Both of us would like to return to our personal work, explore that, and then see how those contributions can make their way back to Cave Collective,” Lauigan explains. “We’ve created a world, and we want to see what we can do with it.”
Wolkowicz, left, and Lauigan, right, surrounded by — and wearing — many of the accoutrements from their installations and performances. Before beginning their collaboration in 2010, both did commercial work outside their individual art practices, Lauigan as an illustrator and Wolkowicz as a photographer. They set up this studio together in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in 2012. (Wolkowicz still works there.)
When they first met, both artists were going through “a down time,” as Lauigan puts it. “I was going through a dark period, living in recluse in California. We were both redefining ourselves as artists and entering new realms, and exploring that together bicoastally – it’s fascinating how we were able to create a language without ever being in the same space.”
Once they both moved to New York, they somewhat accidentally became known for their line of necklaces and rings, pictured, which had been intended more as an element of their performance art than a proper commercial collection.
The pieces featured rope and cast-metal, and sold at high-end boutiques like No. 6 and Bird, but Lauigan and Wolkowicz never really wanted to deal with the production of multiples, so they mostly made tiny batches of one-offs for each client. Now that the pair are on an open-ended hiatus, only Wolkowicz plans to continue experimenting with jewelry.
While Lauigan and Wolkowicz were still working collaboratively in this studio when we shot it, natural zones emerged, this corner being more devoted to Lauigan’s work, which veers towards drawing and fiber-dyeing. The latter interest arose while she was still living in California in 2011, when she would “go to the library and get books on how to coil and make natural dye, then go home and play with materials,” she says.
A cluster of paper dye tests. “I’ve been playing around with making dye from black beans,” says Lauigan. “I’m also dyeing with henna, and dabbling in indigo. Alchinet and mallow blossoms can produce blues and greens, too.”
A one-of-a-kind necklace the duo made for a gallery, its rope dyed with madder root. “We wanted to evoke the idea of armor,” says Lauigan. “These bigger pieces are more art objects for us.”
This massive necklace, dyed with turmeric, was one of the first that Lauigan ever made. “When we started, my necklaces were really unwearable — I just hung them straight on the wall,” she says.
Next to it is a cluster of four fabric panels that represents the current direction that Lauigan’s fiber-based work is taking, now that she’s moving away from jewelry. “I want to go in the direction of more minimal expressions now, still using my love for natural dye,” she says. Hanging to the top right of it is a small cotton shawl Lauigan made, an older piece.
Lauigan is also returning to her large-scale drawing, a miniature example of which is pictured in the center of this photo. Above it hangs a funny one-off object she made when she was throwing out fiber scraps and stuffed them into a small plastic bag. “I just thought it looked cool,” she says. “It’s a little prototype that I’d like to explore on a larger scale. It was trash, and then it turned into the seeds of an idea.”
In the dishes at left are natural ground-up pigments that Lauigan uses for dyeing, while the bouquet on the right is a remnant from a performance she and Wolkowicz did at a community garden in the East Village, in which she “laid out almost a mandala of different flowers,” she says. “Botany and flowers are really symbolic in my work.”
Costumes have also been a big part of Cave Collective’s performances — this is an example of many ideas for those costumes layered on top of each other, including a thick shawl made from strips of dyed cotton and Icelandic wool that Lauigan plans to explore further during the hiatus. “I’d like to do collections of one-of-a-kind shawls and install them as art pieces on a wall,” she says.
Wolkowicz standing in her part of the studio, where she makes her broken-glass sculptures and the models for her metal jewelry. She’s also still an avid photographer — the images to her right are of a wig she suspended in a theater and lit dramatically, while the ones behind her were taken in the Rockaways, where she’d let sculptures she makes from dyed, fiber-stuffed pantyhose mingle with trash on the beach. She’s currently working on a short film featuring the sculptures as well.
Wokowicz with the tools she uses to sculpt her jewelry forms in wax, which she then takes to a local foundry to be cast in brass, bronze, or silver. Before she began collaborating with Lauigan on the necklaces, she was making metal rings inset with crystals — one of which she’s wearing in this photo — on her own. “I’m interested now in making larger art objects to be cast in metal,” she says.
One of several in-progress glass-shard pieces. “They’re all items that I found on the beach, which is about the idea of crystals appearing on found, discarded objects,” says Wolkowicz. The glass is from a stained-glass workshop in Long Island City, whose proprietor lets her take his offcuts “because all I do is smash them up anyway,” she says. “Lately I’ve been using the same technique to create the effect of crystals growing in a corner of a room, both on objects and as part of environments.”
A log inset with glass shards, which was used in a shrine the pair built for their very first collaborative installation but recalls the project Wolkowicz was exhibiting the day she and Lauigan first met, in Oakland.
Test pieces made with the same technique, but on different types of materials. “I may make a collection of them and see how it can all tie together,” says Wolkowicz.
On the upper left corner of this table are examples of her aforementioned pantyhose sculptures. “When I worked in a theater back in Germany, I found a bag of old stockings in beautiful colors, and for some reason I always wanted to fill them with something and suspend them from a tree,” Wolkowicz recalls. “It’s an ongoing fascination that I can’t quite put into words. The objects are something I don’t quite understand, but I think that’s what makes them still intriguing to me.”
Lauigan holding up a small catalog of one of her favorite artists, Hannah Eschel, purchased at a public estate sale that Eschel herself held in her New York City loft. “She’s my spiritual godmother,” Lauigan says.
Wolkowicz gave Lauigan this signed Patti Smith book as a gift before she headed to Iceland in search of wool for her projects. “She’s such an inspiration,” says Wolkowicz. “Her performances, her energy — it’s so powerful.”
This small shrine-like setup in one corner of the studio is another vignette salvaged from Cave Collective’s performance in the East Village garden, which demonstrates their love for all things ceremonial and spiritual. It contains bronze sound bowls that Wolkowicz makes and plays during performances, incense bowls, dried flowers, and crystal rings.
The sound bowls are made in a freeform way, without any intentional efforts to produce a certain sound. “The beauty of the ones I make is that they have a split tone in them,” says Wolkowicz. “They’re in between notes, and depending on where you hit the metal, the sound slightly differs from another place you might strike them at.” (The bowls are still available, along with some of Cave Collective’s jewelry, by custom order.)
One of our favorite facets of Cave Collective’s practice are the large-scale hanging textiles they’ve made for past performances, this one called “There Is No Light Without Darkness.” During their first show together, at End of Century gallery, visitors had to walk through its fringes to enter the rest of the installation. It speaks to the difficult, soul-searching transitions both artists were going through as they were beginning their creative collaboration.
Wolkowicz and Lauigan with more of the textile nets they’ve made for past performances. Now that Lauigan is based in Los Angeles, Wolkowicz shares the studio space with her friend, the phogotrapher Alison Nguyen. The pair have plans to do some kind of Cave Collective presentation or installation at the Mercado Segrado craft fair in LA this May, but other than that, their future is wide open.
For a studio that crafts objects evocative of summer-camp bliss, Fredericks & Mae have an awfully dark creation story. For the last eight months, Gabriel Fredericks Cohen and Jolie Mae Signorile have been hard at work fletching, painting, and spinning bright polyester thread around their custom-made arrows, which sell for $95 apiece at boutiques like Maryam Nassir Zadeh and Partners & Spade. But when they met senior year at Oberlin, says Signorile, “Gabe was really into the apocalypse and I was obsessed with nostalgia. When we got into it, we realized they were kind of about the same thing: a fear of the future.”
If the best reason to know the rules is to be smarter about breaking them, then consider the year-old collaboration between designers Albert Chu and Jennifer Myers not so much a violent upheaval but an exercise in playfully tweaking the system. Chu and Myers met while studying at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design — an institution they say reinforced their respect for constraints — and each worked in architecture and launched an accessories line before combining their shared pedagogy into a series of leather and brass pouches. “I think working within, and rebelling against, a set of parameters is actually the ultimate in design fun,” Myers says. Chu agrees: “We love working with fundamentals and trying to introduce a slight deviation,” says the designer of Otaat, which stands for “one thing at a time.” “Harvard was about being restrained in the conceptual and design intervention, that sometimes the most effective and thorough result could arise from a minimal, subtle act.”
When Egg Collective launched their debut furniture collection at ICFF in 2012 — snagging a Best New Designer award in the process — they seemed to the design world to have come out of nowhere. And in fact, though the three — Stephanie Beamer, Crystal Ellis, and Hillary Petrie — met and began collaborating as 18-year-old freshmen at Washington University's architecture school more than a decade ago, the truth is they had formally joined forces and had begun crafting an ICFF plan only six months earlier. "I remember the three of us sitting outside the Javits Center in our Budget truck, about to move in furniture that we’d been working on with no one having seen for six months," says Beamer. "I was like, you guys, this is it. People could just walk by us the entire fair. But thankfully we seem to have struck a chord and the work resonated."
