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Andy Paiko’s otherworldly glass objects are like curios one might encounter at Hogwarts, or in Tim Burton’s house. Ornate bell jars enshrine gold-plated chunks of coyote spine or other odd fetishes, transformed as if by alchemy. An absinthe fountain, etched with skull and crossbones, conjures a ritual partaking of wicked spirits.
A “lube rack” showcases a sly assortment of quirky wee containers filled with “everything for the friction-free existence,” from motor oil to Vaseline to bourbon. These are elegant implements for strange doings.
“I try to play with functionality,” says Paiko, 32, whose down-to-earth manner contrasts with the gothic eccentricity of ...
Product Placement
Several years ago, Petra Geiger was living in Atlanta and struggling to find the right sales outlets for her handbags and stationery. Many other designers in the area, she realized, were in the same boat.
In 2004 she got a group of them together and founded Beehive Co-op. They launched a store, a sleek contem- porary bazaar where some 50 members showcase their stylish handmade clothing, home accessories and jewelry, such as Olaria Studio’s Chatham ceramic necklace. Geiger, 41, recently moved to Mt. Kisco, New York, and opened a Beehive branch there. North and south, the merchandise is high-quality yet ...
Product Placement
Erica Gordon of Steel Toe Studios didn't plan to be a blacksmith. An artist, yes: Her father is a full-time woodworker who makes spoons, her sister does ceramics, her mother is an avid supporter of the arts. Gordon's been hustling at American Craft Council shows since she was 8 years old. But it was Penland School of Crafts that turned her into a blacksmith, she says.
After earning her BFA from the University of New Mexico, Gordon received a two-week work-study scholarship to the North Carolina craft mecca in 1997. She listed jewelry as her first choice for a class; blacksmithing ...
Product Placement
Albertus Swanepoel's life as a milliner has drawn upon destiny.
While vacationing in Paris in 1989, he had his portrait silhouette done by a street artist.
Swanepoel, at 30, was a successful fashion designer living in his native South Africa. The resulting paper cutout-to his surprise-included a swooping top hat he had not been wearing.
The artist must have been a soothsayer, because three years later Swanepoel enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology to study millinery.
Now Swanepoel is best known for striking classic fedoras, reinvented with creative embellishments such as the grosgrain ribbons he hand-distresses to look old and worn. "You don't ...
Product Placement
“At Esque, our goal is to lead the movement of trend, by creating new notions and uses,” Andi Kovel says of the glass studio she and her partner,
Justin Parker, began in New York in 1999 and now operate in Portland, or. “Our objects are meant to be used and handled, to inspire thought and ideas, emotions and memories. We want our pieces to represent the modern heirloom.”
Esque’s eccentric blown accessories, such as Kovel's Wax Collector and Ouf! (designed with Jill Daniel), lighting fixtures and architectural details are a new kind of art/craft/design hybrid, conceptual pieces for everyday ...
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“We have this incredible opportunity in cities for the bicycle to be a realistic and practical form of transportation—fast, easy, convenient, fun,” says 34-year-old Ezra Caldwell, whose custom bike-building business, Fast Boy Cycles, in New York City, offers both a joyful ride and a thing of beauty.
“These are bikes you have to have a relationship with,” Caldwell says of his soulful single-speeds. “Pure, simple and clean” is the operative aesthetic of the bikes, with features he handcrafts in materials meant “to improve with age”—wood handlebars and fenders, leather saddles, patinaed metal frames. “What I’m making has a classic appeal, ...
Product Placement
When Frances Palmer sits down at the potter’s wheel, she is never quite sure what the result will be. “Even if it’s a vase similar to one I’ve already made, when I sit down and I make it, the clay has it’s own personality,” says Palmer, who is based in Weston, Connecticut. “It depends on the day, the weather—many different factors. Sometimes I want to go straight up and the clay wants to go out. I try to do what the clay wants to do.”
It is the unique “personalities” of Palmer’s asymmetrical vases—such as the four-handled dahlia and bud vases—bowls ...
Product Placement
At Jim Schatz’s creek-side home and studio in upstate New York, the trees bear the fruits of his labor: glossy, egg-shaped earthenware bird houses and feeders, including Red Hot, in a rainbow of colors, tended daily by the artist and product-tested by chickadees, grosbeaks and cardinals.
“There’s experience attached to these items,” says Schatz, 38. “Everything I make gets into my living space, because designs need to be fine-tuned.” His line, J Schatz, also includes lighting, hanging planters, ceramic curtains and salt and pepper shakers, all sophisticated and playful.
“I sit and I ponder shapes,” he says. “I need a concept or ...
Product Placement
“I wanted something unpredictable. Something that, when it’s sitting on a counter, makes people go, ‘What is this?’” says Janene Bourgerie of California-based Jabou Design, talking about her new line of turned-wood pepper mills, aptly called Culinary Art.
These elegant sculptural forms are grooved, striped and checkered in combinations of maple, manzanita and wenge, their unvarnished surfaces sanded and buffed to a smooth finish. Apart from their beauty, the mills have a spiffy Danish grinding mechanism and, according to Bourgerie, a serious foodie, “work incredibly well. I made one for myself about four years ago, and it’s still ...
Product Placement
When Jonathan Adler was 12 years old his parents sent him to camp expecting him to return tanned and toned from two months of swimming and sports. “Instead, they found a pasty potter who had spent the summer in the pottery studio completely obsessed,” jokes Adler. “I came back changed.”
Within a year Adler convinced his parents to buy him a pottery wheel and kiln. “My father was a lawyer, but he spent every spare moment painting and sculpting in his studio in our basement. My parents totally understood my creative drive,” Adler says, revealing why his parents were willing to ...
Product Placement
It’s only appropriate that the New York gallery owner Ralph Pucci has combined forces with Jonathan Kline, a basket weaver and sculptor. Pucci’s gallery and showroom is noted for its one-of-a-kind pieces, limited editions and works produced by the gallery itself. From mannequins, to furniture and lighting, to sculpture and fine art, Pucci is dedicated to venerating the hand of the artist. Since 2004, he has taken that tack with Kline, exhibiting his standing woven sculptures and “flat” woven wall grids.
In line with Pucci’s reverence for the individuality of handmade pieces, the form and material of Kline’s woven sculptures ...
Product Placement
Josh Urso’s furniture and lighting designs are moments frozen in time that invite us to stop, observe and wonder.
“Confuse, amaze and entertain your guests” is the pitch on Urso’s website for his aptly named Specter chairs. To make them he takes fabric, infuses it with resin, then hand-molds it into the form of a seat casually draped with a sheet or blanket. Frameless, hollow, lightweight, the result is indeed ghostly (especially when done in see-through, openwork mesh) and deceptive in more ways than one. At once soft and solid, animated and inert, ethereal and sturdy, it’s a trompe-l’oeil sculpture ...
Product Placement
In 1988 Nawal Motawi, the owner of Motawi Tileworks in Ann Arbor, MI, took a tile production job at the legendary Pewabic Pottery in Detroit. Motawi, who studied ceramics at the University of Michigan, was trying to “find my way,” she says. She found inspiration at Pewabic, where she fell in love with the pottery’s Arts and Crafts-style works.
In 1992 Motawi struck out on her own and in a 600-square-foot garage began creating the historically informed tile designs that reflect the work of Pewabic, Grueby, Rookwood, the Roycrofters, Ernest Batchelder and William De Morgan, as well as the architecture of ...
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“I was searching for an industrial wasteland,” says furniture designer Paul Loebach on why he moved into a former knitting factory in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a gritty neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. “I loved this place. It’s dark and empty. The area’s a bit of a no-man’s-land.”
It’s from this apartment/studio—where designs hang on the walls, books overflow off the bookshelves and his experiments with various materials cover the floor and any other available work space—that Loebach designs pieces that many said would be impossible. “People tell me I can’t do something and then I do it. I’ll be like, ‘I know what ...
Product Placement
An Indigo Crane piece is not just a scarf; it's a statement. Anna Katherine Curfman's glowing, textured, nuno-felted work is more like a floating, wearable sculpture. That's no accident, but maybe it's serendipity.
Curfman had always dreamed of designing clothes. The Bainbridge Island, Washington-based artist was inspired by her mother, a gifted sewing teacher who owned a fabric shop and designed children's clothing. Once Curfman arrived at the Rhode Island School of Design, however, apparel design somehow didn't feel like a good fit. She switched to graphic design. After graduation, she spent a year as a packaging designer for Nordstrom. Then, ...
Product Placement
If a wall clock by Solos Glass strikes you as oddly familiar, that’s because in a past life it may have been your grandma’s ashtray. “Someone will say, ‘Oh, my mom had one of those when I was a kid,’” says Nanda Soderberg, co-owner with his wife, Rebecca Saunders, of the Richmond, Virginia-based studio. These unique pieces are made from vintage pressed-glass wares that the two hunt down at thrift shops and online, then heat and spin out flat. The process turns candy dishes and punch bowls into witty objects in a delightful variety of shapes, textures and colors—lime, cobalt, ...
Product Placement
Run your eyes over the clean steel curves of Marc Maiorana's andiron. Its sleek, contemporary shape may seem to whisper "urban," but it was born in a small smithy in Cedar Bluff, Virginia, in the heart of Appalachia, where Maiorana lives and works.
The blacksmith seems to make a practice of defying easy categorization. Since 2008, he's been running Iron Design Company - specializing in modern, hand-formed steel housewares - alongside Marc Maiorana Studios, the brand for his custom sculptural and architectural commissions, such as sweeping staircase railings.
"They are two different beasts," Maiorana says. "To make 100 of something is very ...
Product Placement
There’s a duality to furniture made by Florian Roeper, a quality of warm/cool, sensuous/ cerebral, organic/industrial. “My work is about bringing together different materials, trying to make them fuse and work together,” he says of his pieces, which combine wood and metal with scorched and etched finishes. “Maybe that’s a metaphor for me.”
The son of a German father and an Italian mother, Roeper, 32, grew up traveling back and forth between the U.S. and Europe, attending elementary school in the San Francisco Bay Area and high school in Germany before earning a degree in furniture design and sculpture from the ...
Product Placement
If the world were in search of a true craft capital, Japan might well fill the bill. Whether the medium is basketry or ceramics or textiles, the Pacific Rim country has a history steeped in work guided by the hand. And though tradition-rich, Japan has also embraced technological advances as few other nations have, and the blending of the two strands has led to impressive endeavors on all fronts.
In 2006, Japan’s unique pairing of hand and machine inspired a singularly creative partnership. After makers Tetsushi Inoue, 33, and Kristina Detwiller, 27 left San Francisco—where Inoue had attended the California ...
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