Week of September 30, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Sophie Lou Jacobsen scales up her glass work, Pinch celebrates its 20th anniversary with an American pop-up, and we put a spotlight on two North Carolina fundraisers to benefit the decimated creative community in Asheville.

Interiors

Once upon a time, we looked at glass blocks as the cyclical return of a trend; now it’s pretty clear they’re here to stay as an evergreen building material. Here, they’re deployed in a complex housing the Robert Plumb Collective, a sort of conglomerate of design/build–related businesses in Botany, the once-gritty suburb of Sydney. Designed by Allied Office, with interiors by Akin Atelier, the project features several materials partially sourced from Robert Plumb sites, like timber and natural stone. Perhaps our favorite detail is the bathroom covered in crushed recycled terracotta tile. Photos © Rory Gardiner

Discoveries

Launching this month from the London studio Sedilia is the Pylon collection, a series of three seating pieces that subtly taper from the ground up, recalling the gates of ancient Egyptian temples. The blocky, monolithic forms are softened by fuzzy, moss-toned upholstery from Pierre Frey (or, in the case of the daybed, an almost veined boiled wool by Holland & Sherry). Bonus points if you too can pair with a massive, mid-century canvas like the one seen here.

Marimekko keeps finding fresh ways to spin its iconic Unikko flower, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. The latest is a collaboration with Finnish jewelry brand Kalevala Koru, featuring brooches, rings, pendants and earrings made from recycled silver. Our favorite is probably the oversized floral brooch, which might be just the thing we need to actually start wearing brooches?

Monica’s artistic hardware showroom Petra just launched the first-ever series of cabinet hardware by Block Shop Textiles, designed by Block Shop co-founder Hopie Stockman Hill. Inspired by the oft-Instagrammed snail-shaped door handles Hill designed for Block Shop’s LA flagship, the collection includes six knobs hand-cast in brass: a snail, a dogwood flower, a peapod (exclusive to Petra), and three rounded shapes.

Exhibitions

At this year’s Armory Show, the women-owned gallery Berry Campbell presented a modern take on Women Choose Women, the 1973 exhibition devoted solely to women artists and curated by a committee of women artists at the New York Cultural Center. Our favorite piece on view in this go-round was this abstract expressionist 1961 painting by the late Ethel Schwabacher.

Speaking of art fairs, I first encountered the work of Hasani Sahlehe at Frieze this spring; now the Atlanta-based artist has his just completed his first solo show with Canada Gallery. His paintings feature huge swathes of color, achieved through a mixture of thick pourable acrylic gel and airbrushing, and they’re inspired by the synesthetic experience of listening to music and channeling it into a composition.

Last fall, I went to the late Finnish artist Iria Leino’s former Soho apartment, which was filled to the brim with canvases. (You can see a peek of it in this excellent NYT article about the artist.) At the time, some of them were being cleaned out and repaired in anticipation of a solo show at Harper’s in New York, on view until October 19. It’s the first solo exhibition from Leino’s estate, and, frankly, one of the first times her work has ever engaged with the gallery system. During her lifetime, “the artist opted for an existence devoted to her studio practice and her faith in Buddhism, seeing her work as a means of spiritual enlightenment rather than a commercial endeavor.”

On view until October 19 at Nina Johnson gallery in Miami is Residual Energies, the first curatorial endeavor by Elle Decor editor Camille Okhio. The show is about the “energetic transference between the animate and inanimate” and features terrazzo canvases by Ficus Interfaith, cartapesta wall sculptures by F. Taylor Colantonio, copper and enamel vessels by Valentina Cameranesi Sgroi, and so much more.

During last month’s London Design Festival, Sophie Lou Jacobsen debuted Tulipa, a new glassware collection developed in collaboration with heritage wallpaper brand de Gournay. In De Gournay’s London showroom, Jacobsen partnered with New York antiques dealer Christopher Cawley to pull together vignettes that might showcase the floral glass works inspired by de Gournay’s famed Chinoiserie wallpapers. We love the vases and urns but our favorite piece might be the mirror with delicate floral vines running along its edges.

The London design studio Pinch is celebrating its 20th anniversary, and to celebrate, they’ve set up a pop-up shop inside the Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery in Tribeca, featuring their new collection. Among the pieces: a molded Jesmonite lamp, daintily scaled sconces with fiber abaca shades, a green glass side table, and an iridescent coffee table whose dark-ocean palette was inspired by a photo of England’s Lake Windermere. Closes October 8.

Fundraisers

After the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene in Asheville, North Carolina, this week, we wanted to highlight a few of the fundraisers that are happening to bring relief to the region. The Center for Craft is activating its Craft Futures Fund, a grant program that will provide emergency relief to the artists of Western NC in hopes of rebuilding what was shaping up to be one of the more exciting creative hubs in the country.

And East Fork is donating 5% of all sales this week to local grassroots organizations; purchases will also help keep the Asheville-based company afloat as they and their team rebuild. Use this as an excuse to buy pieces in our favorite glaze to date, the powdery blue Big Sky. (Our favorite pieces are the Everyday Bowl and the Weeknight Serving Bowl, in case you were wondering!)