If you only knew Kay Wang through her Instagram — and chances are you might, considering her 33,000 followers — you wouldn’t necessarily immediately know what she does for a living. She could easily be a baker, a stylist, a ceramicist, or a woodworker; in December alone, she posted pictures from her Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, apartment of the frangipane tart she’d baked, the cherry cutting boards she’d sanded and oiled, the canvas bags she’d dyed with onion skin, and the silk cord necklaces she’d strung with hand-carved brass pendants. (And you’d certainly never guess that she spent nine years before moving to Brooklyn as an online marketer in Los Angeles and Seattle.) What she is, very clearly, is a restless creative spirit; so much so that even though her main focus right now is as a jewelry designer who crafts under the moniker The Things We Keep, she has trouble pinning herself with a specific label.
“It’s not that I don’t consider myself a designer, but I think there’s a big difference between people who design and people who make,” Wang explains. “I do things from start to finish. I design and I also fabricate, and though jewelry’s specifically what I do, it’s not beadwork. It’s casting, it’s working with wax, it’s working with metal. It has traditionally not been considered an art. It’s traditionally been considered skilled labor, which adds another layer of complexity. So I guess the short version is I don’t have a particular label. It’s more that I find a lot of value in designing something — seeing it in my mind and being able, with my two hands and through a craft that I’ve honed, to make it into something tangible that I can feel and I can show you.”
No matter what it is she’s doing, though, it’s found her a good deal of success in the time since she switched gears three years ago — or at least enough success that she felt brave enough to make jewelry a full-time gig. Wang says she felt inspired by the small community of makers in Brooklyn who seemed to be in the same boat: “It’s incredibly liberating to find that people you think are doing really well still had day jobs that they didn’t let on before they made the leap. To know that you can do something and a number of years down the road, you can say this is not for me and move on to something else.”
We recently caught up with Wang in the live/work space she shares with her boyfriend, her dog, and her two cats, Sushi and Chops, inside a converted textile factory. Her apartment seems of a piece with her jewelry line — a small space that’s been carefully edited to let each item breathe and show off its quiet simplicity. Also: a space to chow down on flourless peanut butter cookies topped with sea salt, which Wang had baked the day before we arrived. Either way, it’s a nice place to spend the afternoon.
“Our apartment is perpetually in some state of tumult, so a pillow overturned here and stuff on our coffee table there can usually be taken for granted,” says Wang. “The couch is a vintage Vatne Mobler couch that I scored on eBay and had shipped all the way from Ohio to NYC. (I really wanted it!)”
“The studio space as it lives underneath our bedroom loft, with everything handy nearby. The cross brace on the frame for the loft lent itself very well to shelving, so we put up a number of shelves just above the bench to keep everything within arm’s reach. A basket from Doug Johnston can be seen in the background, and I made the hanging Himmeli mobile out of white coffee stirrer straws. The jewelry rack to the left was repurposed from a piece of driftwood I found on the Washington coast.”
“Since moving out of my ceramics studio in Queens, I’ve had to move all my unfinished ceramic work home, and here it lives temporarily alongside some bracelets both made and acquired over the years.”
“A favorite little storage cabinet from a salvage shop when I went to visit a friend in DC. It came with probably a good five pounds of rusty nails, drill bits and random old bits and bobs when I acquired it. It now houses a variety of my jewelry supplies and components.”
“A magnetic knife rack from Ikea makes a great tool rack to keep pliers handy without taking up any valuable bench space.”
An array of studs from The Things We Keep atop a weaving Wang made using a blue rope gifted by her friend, the designer Ilana Kohn.
“I make everything here,” says Wang. “The casting is the only part of the process that I don’t do, because it’s pretty toxic and very equipment intensive. The top part of the stud is cast and the posts I put on myself. Then everything is hand finished here. These are some unfinished studs, that’s what it looks like when I get it back. There’s quite a bit or work that still needs to be done and it’s a huge pain in the butt because things are so tiny!”
More pieces from The Things We Keep. Many of Wang’s pieces are inspired by nature, including the tiny kidney studs in the foreground, which were cast from the leaf of a tiny succulent plant.
Wang’s sweet and photogenic dog Corn, who features prominently on The Things We Keep Instagram, which, if you aren’t following yet, you should!
“Our one lady animal of the household, Sushi. Along with her half brother Chops, they’ve been with me since they were kittens through three state moves!”
“Our cat Chops love to munch on greenery, so for years I gave up on keeping any plants in the house until I acquired this steel cabinet from an opp shop in Bushwick. It’s the perfect height to keep all possible veggie kitty snacks out of kitty’s way, but short enough so that I can still easily water our plant friends.”
“The bench came from my boyfriend’s mother and had been in her family for as long as she can remember; it’s gone through several phases since moving to the big city, from plant stand to extra seating to its present configuration, a little display nook for the tiny ceramic pieces I’ve collected, a Morgan Peck sculpture and an ever growing collection of beads from my friend Julianne Ahn of Object & Totem.”
Since we visited, Wang has repurposed those beads into a wall hanging, using a tiny vine of driftwood.
“The big hanging wooden plane came from one of my favorite swap meets, the Pasadena Community College swap meet. Despite the fact that it really does fly, for now it hangs out looking through the windows at the passersby on our block and the automotive garage across the street. The bottles on the windowsill are lucky finds from Bottle Beach at Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn. I love the way they catch the light on a sunny day.”
Inspiration pieces and thrift-store ceramic finds including a striated mug by Robert Blue on the top shelf and our own Rubber-Dipped Dot Mug by Josephine Heilpern of Recreation Center (Wang is the one who first introduced us to Josephine’s work!)
More ceramics including a few made by Wang herself.
“A collection I’ve kept for some time: a few of my vintage cameras sit high on a shelf we built above our kitchen cabinets.”
An aerial view of the living room. Not shown (we couldn’t get a good angle!): the amazing pair of long horns Wang lugged all the way from a thrift shop in Long Beach, CA. “If you stand it end to end, it’s taller than me. It’s really cool.”
“Many people ask about the textile hung on the wall above our bed, but it’s really just a small rug,” says Wang. “Some textiles stacked on the shelf were acquired on previous travels to Iceland, Vietnam and Turkey, and a few other favorite things hang out on the shelf above the bed.”
Wang wearing her own designs: Vik Mountain studs, Brekka Ring, and her new brass and sterling silver Elta Rings, which were inspired by the bandsaw blade at her friend Arielle Alasko’s studio. Go to The Things We Keep to purchase!
Talk about the right place at the wrong time: I left Berlin to come back to New York two weeks ago, and thus managed to miss what may end up being the coolest event of the summer, tonight's opening of Keren Richter and Gabriel Kuo's RATS pop-up shop in Mitte. Kuo, who's an art director and graphic designer, and Richter, an illustrator and artist, are both longtime New Yorkers who (like me) consider Berlin as something of a second home; for RATS, they joined forces to bring the German capital a strange sampling of some of their favorite objects and oddities from New York and beyond, everything from Fort Standard bottle openers to Knicks hats to strange souvenirs they've acquired on their travels. If you're in Berlin or headed there, don't miss the chance to visit the shop at Torstrasse 68 before it closes at the end of August. Otherwise, get a virtual sneak peek at it here, alongside an interview with Richter and Kuo about how and why they put the RATS project together.
Designers around the world owe Johanna Agerman Ross a drink, or perhaps even a hug: Her new project, the biannual magazine Disegno, is devoted to letting their work breathe. “I always found it frustrating working for a monthly, because I couldn’t give a subject enough time or space to make it worthwhile,” says the former Icon editor. “For a project that took 10 or 15 years to make, it felt bizarre to represent it in one image, or four pages.” Founded by her and produced with the help of creative director Daren Ellis, Disegno takes some of the visual tropes of fashion magazines — long pictorial features, single-photo spreads, conceptual photography — and marries them with the format of a textbook* and the investigative-reporting ambitions of The New Yorker. The story about Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec which we’ve excerpted here, for example, fills 22 pages of the new issue and runs to nearly 3,000 words; it’s accompanied by images captured over two full days the photographer spent with the brothers, one in their studio and one at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where they were installing their latest retrospective, “Bivouac.” And articles on Martin Szekely, Azzedine Alaïa, and Issey Miyake’s Yoshiyuki Miyamae are set either over lunch, or in the subject’s living room. The focus, says Agerman Ross, is on proper storytelling. “The people behind the project, the process of making something, even the process of the writer finding out about the story — that’s all part of it,” she says. “It’s the new journalism.” Obviously, we couldn’t agree more.
When we — and the rest of the design world — were first introduced to her at the 2009 London Design Festival, Faye Toogood already seemed like Superwoman: Having just left her post as a stylist at the UK shelter magazine World of Interiors and cast out on her own, she'd engineered a coming-out party for herself that included a collaborative installation with Gallery Fumi featuring designs made from corn, a Memphis-inspired playroom with an Arabeschi di Latte egg bar, and a temporary shop for Tom Dixon that showcased how she'd begun to transform his brand image. Just seeing her do it was enough to make us feel stressed, and that was before we knew that she was about to reinvent herself again, this time as a furniture designer. Her first collection, Assemblage 1, was inspired by modernist sculpture, British craftsmanship, and her childhood growing up in the English countryside; it gave way to Assemblage 2 in Milan earlier this year, which took a darker, edgier turn. Finally, with Phillips de Pury last week, Toogood unveiled the third chapter in the series, and the most ambitious to date — it's based around her fascination with iridescence, and it took a motorcycle fabricator, a gun maker, and a studio full of assistants in gas masks to complete. I was asked by Phillips to conduct an in-depth interview with Toogood to appear in the show's catalog, and so Sight Unseen received special permission to reprint that interview here. It's lengthy, but it offers a good deal of insight into the mind of one of the most intriguing and ambitious personalities working in design right now.
