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07.30.20

Up and Coming

Harvey Bouterse’s New Ceramic Lamp is a Study in Contrasting Textures

It's basically our job here at Sight Unseen to follow the career trajectory of up-and-coming designers, and in our professional capacity, we've come to realize that most ceramicists follow a certain path: First come the smalls, like cups and mugs and plates and vases. The next step is usually lamps — think of Natalie Weinberger's pleated clay shades, Workaday Handmade's listing table lamps, and BZIPPY's pyramid-shaped bases. Today, we're featuring one of the first lamps by Belgium-based Harvey Bouterse.
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07.24.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Independent Design Label Launches in the South of France

The tiny town of Hyères in the South of France is only 50 square miles, but has long had an outsized presence on the contemporary design map as the home of the arts foundation Villa Noailles and its annual Design Parade festival. The festival was canceled this year due to the pandemic — more on that next week! — but two young Parisians have managed to fill in the gap with an exhibition called Été Super, which is serving as the launch of their independent design brand 13Desserts and its permanent showroom in a former Hyères skate shop.
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07.23.20

Up and Coming

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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07.19.20

Saturday Selects

Week of July 13, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: paintings inspired by orange wine, a fruit bowl that prevents bruising and rot, and a turquoise-and-yellow eco-retreat we'll probably never travel to, so at least we can gawk at the pics.
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07.15.20

Current Obsession

Scandinavian Art Mirrors Are Having a Moment — Here’s Our Latest Favorite

If you are one of the 36,000 people who follow 26-year-old Simone Noa Hedal on Instagram, you probably know her as a very specific kind of Danish influencer who posts photos of herself — wearing clothes that are often the color of cotton candy or peach sorbet — interspersed with art and design inspirations working within a similar palette: Wang & Soderström, Helle Mardahl, Roger Muhl, Justin Morin, and the Seoul bakery Banana Haruki, among others. But last year, Hedal began posting in earnest pieces she had made herself that fit snugly into her already-established aesthetic — a series of mirrors painted with swoops of pastel acrylic paint.
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07.14.20

At Home With

How Brendan Ravenhill Ended Up Living In — And Restoring — a 1938 Schindler House in the Hills of Los Angeles

Brendan Ravenhill and his wife, Marjory Garrison, had been living in Echo Park for years before they realized that they were living around the corner from a gem of Modernist architecture. Built in 1938 by Rudolf Schindler, the Austrian architect whose volumetric residences dot Los Angeles, the Southall house, as it's called, was hidden from street view and in a state of disrepair when it fell into Ravenhill's lap in the mid-2010s.
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07.06.20

Sighted

Caroline Z. Hurley’s Gee’s Bend–Inspired, Stitched-Together Paintings

Caroline Z. Hurley is best known for her block-printed quilts, tablecloths, blankets, and fabrics by the yard, but if you follow Hurley on Instagram, you know that painting is also a huge part of the Brooklyn-based artist's practice. Her newest works combine elements of both mediums, using vintage fabrics or cottons woven by hand by artisans in Oaxaca as the base for painted and stitched-together canvases.
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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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Nicolette Johnson Assemblage vases
06.29.20

Sighted

These Surrealist-Inspired Vases Are the Breakthrough That Resulted From a Creative Block

At the beginning of the pandemic, some designers may have viewed the ensuing solitude as an opportunity to "bloom where you grow." But not everyone found it easy to stay inspired. "After lockdown started in the early months of 2020, I felt completely unmotivated to make work," confesses the Brisbane ceramicist Nicolette Johnson. After a while, however, Johnson gave herself permission to make literally anything, and began sculpting shapes out of soft clay — inspired by Surrealist and Constructivist motifs — and attaching them to small wheel-thrown vases.
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06.25.20

Up and Coming

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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06.22.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

At Villa Cavrois, Muller Van Severen is an Eerily Perfect Match for the Modernist Estate

This month, the Belgian design duo Muller Van Severen begin a four-month intervention at Villa Cavrois, the modernist French estate designed in the late 1920s by Robert Mallet-Stevens. The show is a retrospective of sorts for the husband-and-wife duo, featuring everything from their leather-and-steel Duo Seats to brand-new work like the Alltubes series they launched this spring with Valerie Traan at Collectible and a sofa they've designed specifically in response to the installation site.
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