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Artificial / Natural
Amid the projects presented at Design Miami Basel 2016, a design trend emerges in which the artificial tries to appear even more natural than nature itself is able to do.
An important showcase for collectable design, with galleries showing from all over the world, Design Miami Basel (14–19 June 2016) also offers an overall picture of current trends in experimental, art-led design. For some years, galleries have been commissioning designers with projects that enable them to explore more freely different languages, materials and production methods.
Top and above: Sediment vases by Olivier Van Herpt for Vivid gallery, Rotterdam
In a never-ending osmotic landscape, the experimentation that emerges from art design feeds mass-produced design with new ideas and forms of aesthetic expression. While the notion of the “new artisan” has focussed attention back onto techniques of making, seeking to interpret their vocabulary, the study of technique pushed to the extreme now brings with it a reversal of meaning: the artificial seems to appear even more natural than what Mother Nature can come up with. As such, more than one gallery presented pieces that seemed to have emerged from a process of fossilisation, with almost stalagmitic protuberances, or wood that seems to have been shaped by the weather, or objects that recall the pattern of honeycombs but have little of natural wax.
A Future Made presents Nature Lab. Photo James Harris
The Crafts Council of the UK, always “on track” when it comes to new experiments in craft, has in fact commissioned six designer-makers to work on the transformation of nature (Nature Lab). Each interpretation is highly personal yet each has tried to capture, in a kind of freeze-frame, what most distinguishes nature: unrepeatable and constantly changing elements. British-based designer Marlène Huissoud unites the Venetian technique of blown glass with incision, making vessels onto which she applies a glass resin that is first melted and then engraved with patterns resembling beehives. The result is an unusual material that retains the translucence of glass combined with a strange tactility of “natural” irregularity.
Emily Gardiner
Sculptor and ceramic artist Emily Gardiner captures the fleeting moment, as does glassmaker Joseph Harrington. The first immortalises the the force of the drop that overflows from the pot as liberating the material from the constriction of its artificial surround. The second captures, though the fixedness of glass, the moment in which ice melts. “Nature Lab” is the first project in a broader two-year initiative, “A Future Made” that brings together the Crafts Council, The New Craftsmen, Craft Scotland and Ruthin Craft Centre and is aimed at raising the profile of British craft via international design fairs.
Sediment vases by Olivier Van Herpt for Vivid gallery, Rotterdam
Olivier Van Herpt of the Netherlands has created the Sediment collection of vases for the Vivid gallery in Rotterdam, specialised in Dutch contemporary art-led design. Van Herpt pushes to the limits the techniques of additive printing with ceramic materials, very difficult to work in large pieces due to the weight of the wet clay. The collection seeks an aesthetic that lies half way between artificial and natural, the fact of the machine and the fact of Nature. The three vases present different three-dimensional surfaces that go from an almost fractal pattern to a completely organic one. A graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2015, Olivier Van Herpt has already presented this collection to the Cooper Hewitt in New York as well as major Dutch museums.
I vasi scultura realizzati dal tedesco Ernst Gamperl per la galleria Sara Myerscough di Londra. Photo Bernhard Spoettel
The sculptural vases by German Ernst Gamperl for the Sara Myerscough gallery in London have the appearance of fossilised wood. For two decades, Gamperl has been studying the process of drying wood, seeking to control it to make sculptural forms. The curves and dips, indentations and fractures in the wood, as well as the surface textures, originate from a process of controlled deformation of the material. The treatment of the surface, by means of special sanding and waxing is also aimed at a kind of “natural beauty,” achieved via complex manipulation.
Johannes Nagel seeks a sense of the temporary, the unfinished. Made for London gallery Fumi, his vases seem to have survived the onslaught of the environment: stripped-down and eroded by the weather and deteriorated over the course of time. Yet they maintain a reminder of what they used to be with fragments of glazed and decorated ceramic. This poetic effect is achieved with the rupture and union of different pieces of ceramic and the use of sand casting. These give the surface a special eroded appearance.
Joseph Harrington
Recalling driftwood or bundles of mangrove roots is the table by Danish Mathias Bengtsson that not by chance is called Growth (for Paris gallery Maria Wettergren). Made from walnut, the table aims not only to emulate organic forms but to combine digital with natural growth. A seed of genetically modified and controllable DNA is governed artificially in its phases of maturation and growth. Factors such as weather conditions are applied in an intentional manner with the aim of guiding the final form. With this work Mathias Bengtsson aims to express the labile and controversial boundary between natural and artificial, between design and the yet untapped potential of applied technology.
