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01.27.23

American Design Hot List

The 2022 American Design Hot List, Part V

This week we announced our 10th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the fifth and final group of Hot List designers here (including Tiffany Howell of Night Palm, and her Lana Del Rey–inspired Miami project, above).
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03.15.19

Excerpt: Exhibition

Think Women Are Underrepresented in the Creative Arts? This Exhibition Does Too

The design world hasn't yet grappled with the chronic underrepresentation of women by brands — the Instagram @showmealist was a good idea that seems to have sadly fizzled out — but female designers and curators are doing just fine supporting each other, thankyouverymuch. The latest is an exhibition at Ox Poblenou in Barcelona, inaugurated on International Women's Day and curated by Sanna Völker, a Swedish furniture designer and curator living in Spain.
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03.04.19

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Showcase for Experimental Craft — And Iridescence — On View in London

Like Salon in New York, the Collect fair in London has recently evolved to become a platform for enabling more risk-taking work, showcasing the latest possibilities, processes, and technologies at play in the field of making. The peripatetic London gallery Seeds, a longtime SU favorite, returned to the fair this year with newly commissioned works from nine contemporary designers.
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Melbourne design store Guild of Objects
07.22.16

What They Bought

A Must-Visit Design Store in Melbourne

Guild of Objects fills an interesting gap in Melbourne — a store that isn’t quite a gallery, but is far from a gift shop. Each object — handmade by an Australian maker and often one-of-a-kind — has a story behind it. Quality materials and an emphasis on craftsmanship are central to each piece — otherwise they wouldn’t be here.
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06.15.16

Up and Coming

Inside the Rope-Painting, Basket-Making World of Gemma Patford

After attempting to learn to crochet, Patford realized it was not for her and instead turned to artists who were working with rope like Doug Johnston, who remains one of her heroes. “I muddled my way through the Internet to find a process that worked with my abilities and with what I had at home. I had a sewing machine and paint — and the baskets were born,” she says.
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01.26.15

Travel

Glass Villages, Ceramics Factories, and Split-Pea Soup: Our Week in Finland

If you’re a longtime reader of this site, you know that we are, above all, sunshine-seeking people who happen to be inextricably linked to New York and its fickle seasons. Normally we leap at the chance to hightail it off the East Coast anytime between November and April, in search of beaches, pools, palm trees, and vitamin D. But somehow, while Monica and the rest of the design world headed to Miami at the beginning of December, I found myself saying yes to a week in Finland, home of 30-degree temperatures and 3PM sunsets. When I arrived, no fewer than three people delighted in telling me that the previous month in Finland had seen only 15 hours of sunshine.
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01.07.15

Up and Coming

Oyyo, Swedish Textile Designers

Lina Zedig and Marcus Åhrén, of the Stockholm-based studio Oyyo, take a best-of-both-worlds approach to their work. If Zedig is the self-described perfectionist who obsesses over color and composition, Åhrén is the “action person, always keen to get new projects going and thinking that everything is possible.” For their first collection, which launched in 2013, they employed age-old techniques to craft flat-weave dhurries, but imbued the familiar form with unexpected geometric and architectural patterns. And while their carpets — in combinations of pastel pinks, yellows, and oranges, deep blues, greens, and black — have a cozy, at-home feel, they also reflect the restless, roving spirit in which Åhrén and Zedig, avid travelers, created them. It’s design for settling in, not settling down.
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10.22.14

The Making of

Make a Sculpey Mobile, With Fort Makers

The team behind Fort Makers don’t refer to themselves as a design studio but rather an “artist collective,” and there’s a marked difference: They make functional objects, but instead of producing a stream of products with a unified aesthetic, they each work individually under the studio umbrella, experimenting with whatever interests them at any given time. In a way, it’s that same sense of structureless structure that first attracted Noah Spencer to the idea of making mobiles: You can hang pretty much anything from them, as long as you get the balance right. “Any kind of visual language can be carried into the mobile world,” says Spencer, a Paul Loebach and Uhuru Design alum who co-founded Fort Makers in 2008. While he primarily makes models hung with simple wooden shapes, he’s also been toying around lately with more expressive elements made from polymer clay (aka Sculpey), a method he graciously offered to teach Sight Unseen readers in this tutorial.
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09.05.14

Q+A

Ricky Swallow vs. Matt Paweski, for Herald St London

As much fun as it is, as journalists, to the pick the brains of the artists and designers who inspire us every day, there's something we enjoy even more: being a fly on the wall as two of our favorite creatives spar back and forth about their craft. It's something we'll never understand as intimately as those who are makers themselves, and when those makers are as thoughtful about their work as Los Angeles artists Ricky Swallow and Matt Paweski are, it makes for a most excellent Friday read. Swallow interviewed Paweski in advance of the latter's solo exhibition, opening tomorrow at Herald St gallery in London, and we were lucky enough to nab a transcription of that Q&A. Read on to find out what makes a Matt Paweski, which direction his work is going in, and what the heck a "kerf" actually is.
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04.22.14

Up and Coming

Doug Johnston, Basket Artist

Growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Doug Johnston was surrounded by the Native American art that his parents voraciously collected — woven rugs, Kachina dolls and coiled baskets made from materials such as pine needles, yucca, acacia and bear grass. But when the Brooklyn-based designer decided a few years ago that he’d like to learn coiling himself, to make baskets from stitched lengths of cotton rope, he didn’t travel to the Southwest to train with a master craftsperson. Instead, he went on YouTube, scouring instructional videos for a new approach. “Traditional coiling techniques are really labor-intensive,” he says. “You have to go inch by inch, one stitch at a time, and mastering that technique could take years. I was too impatient.”
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04.03.14

Up and Coming

Grain, furniture and product designers

To hear the story of James and Chelsea Minola — the married couple behind Seattle’s Grain design studio — you begin to wonder how it’s possible their paths didn’t cross even earlier in life. Both grew up in Southern California — James in San Diego, and Chelsea in Los Angeles, where her parents were the owners of a punk rock store at the Sherman Oaks Galleria. In the early ’90s, both families relocated to the Pacific Northwest, and James and Chelsea moved east to Providence, Rhode Island, around the same time to attend RISD — James as an undergrad in engineering and Chelsea as a graduate in industrial design. But the two didn’t meet until they both enrolled in a short course called “Bridging Cultures Through Design,” where they worked first in Providence, tinkering with ideas about weaving, and then for a few weeks in Guatemala, where they learned how to work with talented local artisans. The trip would eventually lead the two friends down the path to marriage but it also introduced them to the way in which their future studio would run.
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