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07.28.20

Up and Coming

A Former Dancer, Virginie Hucher Uses Her Whole Body to Sketch Out Paintings in the Earth

French artist Virginie Hucher’s paintings begin in the middle of nowhere. Through a meeting of performance and land art, she uses her whole body to carve large symbols into the sand, the snow, or the clay alongside a river bed with a stick as her only tool. She then documents her process in film and photographs, so she can appropriate the gestures when she begins to recreate the forms in paint back in her studio.
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07.23.20

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This French Design Studio’s Process is Steeped in Tradition

The couple behind Haos – neither of whom is formally trained in design – work primarily with French artisans who often have decades of experience working with the same material. It's a process rooted in all things tangible and permanent, one whose outcome can only and inevitably be an object that's been stripped down to its most essential form.
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07.20.20

Up and Coming

Polina Miliou’s Paper Pulp Pieces Have So Much Personality She Sometimes Gets Mad At Them

Whether chairs, macaroni-shaped light fittings, or knotted, tubular standing lamps, Polina Miliou sees her pieces as creatures. “I often start from an archetypal furniture form and gradually twist it into more of a character,” she says. Once she’s sculpted their form, she dresses the pieces in a final smooth layer of papier-mâché. “It is a slow but fun process, during which I literally slap and caress the furniture,” she says. “The time I spend with each piece lets me build a personal relationship with it."
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07.16.20

Up and Coming

Meet the South Korean Designer Making Furniture From Lacquered Volcanic Stone

Seven years ago, Seoul-born Jeongseob Kim set out to find a niche that would define his identity as an independent designer. He began experimenting with using black or brightly colored cement to fill in the cracks and crevices created in the process of making cast-concrete stools, lamps, and tabletops. Calling the project Emergence, though, turned out to be prescient — rather than being his sole calling card, it ended up inspiring a body of work that draws on similar ideas but is even more layered and process-driven.
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07.01.20

Up and Coming

Gabriella Picone’s New Company — And Hand-Painted Silk Scarves — Were Inspired By Summers in Sicily

After working for four years at the New York design gallery R & Company, artist and RISD grad Gabriella Picone shifted to a full-time studio practice this year to pursue ceramics, painting, and textiles. Her first collection — the result of a company she founded called idda, which means "her" in Sicilian dialect and was inspired by Picone's childhood summers in Sicily — is a series of silk and cotton scarves printed with Picone's expressive paintings on paper.
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06.25.20

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These Duotone Vases Are Reversible, Depending On Your Color Scheme — Or Mood

The up-and-coming Australian designer Dean Toepfer had been primarily working on commissions and larger furniture pieces — like a bar cart made from a faux terrazzo composite and a sling chair upholstered in pink shag — since graduating from RMIT. But with the onset of the pandemic, Toepfer decided to reassess. "Vase Versa is my first object collection, and first self-produced range," Toepfer explains.
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04.28.20

Up and Coming

Designer & Rendering Artist Charlotte Taylor is Imagining The Brighter Future We Need Now

London-based designer Charlotte Taylor popped back on our radar recently with her Tiled House, a 3D rendered residence that begs the question: What if your whole house could be as hard to clean as the bathroom? All jokes aside, the eye-catching space is a bit of an engineering feat, real or imagined, as well as a kind of microcosm of the portfolio Taylor's been building over the past few years bridging those two worlds.
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Cape Town ceramicist Ceri Muller
04.27.20

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The Cape Town Ceramicist Making Crinkled Vases and Clay Faces

Here’s a tip for anyone suffering from the fear of starting something creative: Make the ugliest thing you can think of. That’s the genius bit of advice that ceramics artist Ceri Muller’s partner gave her when she felt blocked, faced with her first lump of clay. “I did that and carried on doing it and those ugly little things morphed into these heads that I grew to really love,” she says.
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Bofred Cape Town design studio
03.04.20

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An Earthy New Furniture Collection, Inspired By the South African Coastline

There’s a lot that separates Muscat, Oman’s port capital, and Durban on the east coast of South Africa. But it’s their similarities that have inspired the new Bask Collection by up and coming South African design studio Bofred. Christa Botha and Carla Erasmus are the design duo behind Bofred, whose concept of home is an eclectic mix of the two coastal cities where they feel most relaxed and inspired.
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02.19.20

Up and Coming

Meet The RISD Grad Pushing Pastel Pulp To The Forefront of Sustainable Design

Twenty-two-year-old Mike Ruiz-Serra grew up in Westchester, a great vantage point from which to peer in on New York’s constantly evolving design scene. And for his first collection as an industrial design graduate from RISD, he cites barely-older-than-him contemporaries like Zach Martin and Thomas Barger as people whose work helped him to understand the full potential of his favored medium: paper pulp.
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