How do you hold absence? How do you embody something that’s missing, or give shape and weight to a fleeting phantom? The six limited-edition pieces in Grace Prince’s new furniture collection — called Held Absence and made exclusively for London’s Béton Brut gallery, where it’s currently on view — all explore this paradox. The themes of absence and fragility that color this collection invoke their seeming opposites, presence and strength, while also raising the question: Are they such opposites after all?

London-born, Zurich-based Prince conceived of these pieces after a stretch spent living in a traditional Japanese house just north of Kyoto. In a master craftsman’s workshop, she found a rough-hewn offcut of wood, which she later cast in bronze, and which became the central element of this collection. Which means these pieces are literally built around a source material that’s no longer there. They seem put together with an easy spontaneity and an air of improvisation and impermanence, but possess a solid, structural integrity. They’re functional yet they also capture, as Prince puts it, “a childhood nostalgia for breaking, and a beautiful naivety in discovering if something is fragile or not, the density of an object, the feel of things.”

In Held Absence, a desk of precisely-cut glass and rationally geometric iron rails almost disintegrates (or transforms) into an assemblage of the bronze cast fragments and light, polished stainless-steel rods. As does a coffee table, where a patination process involved the application of bronze dust from the foundry floor. The wood fragment is incorporated yet again in candleholders made of cast bronze and delicate-looking steel. A rippling glass top is supported by an architectural frame of thin steel and thicker metal legs in the side table. And two creature-like stools are made of painted steam-bent wood offcuts; the element of chance in their making is evident in the full-on personalities they exude.