Monday, October 29, 2012

Amber Cowan: Recycling “Colony Harvest” Tableware

Whole Milk Wash Basin in Colony Harvest2012
Mirror in Colony Harvest / 2012
The sublimely talented Amber Cowan is a sculptor working primarily with glass. She received both her MFA in Glass/Ceramics from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and her BFA in 3-Dimensional Design with a concentration in Glass from Salisbury University. 

Not content to follow a traditional path, today she is perfecting an original process involving flameworking, blowing, and hot-sculpting recycled, up-cycled, found and second-life glass. Her materials are typically American pressed glass from the 1940s–1980s, giving her work a vibrant sense of history with references to mid-century craftsmanship.

I’m particularly drawn to one of her recent pieces — Whole Milk Wash Basin in Colony Harvest. She created the piece by using found glass from the Lancaster Colony Corporation, a thriving American pressed glass manufacturer which operated from 1907–2002.

The Colony Harvest pattern was a quite popular line of opaque milk glass tableware produced from the 1950s–1980s. Back in the day, postwar consumers would acquire the tableware through S&H Green Stamps, a rewards and return system. Today thrift stores are inundated with the pattern, as preceding generations are replacing it with today’s modern wares.

“I reconstruct this glass and alter its original state while keeping intact the original vintage feeling,” Amber explains. “I wish to reference the history of the pressed glass industry and bring into focus the feeling of its past glory and forlorn future.”

The peaceful milky-white glass reincarnated into a complex composition definitely gives the Colony Harvest pattern new life.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Interview with Martha Davis



Marilyn Monroe once said, “Give the girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world”. Every time I marvel over Martha Davis’s shoes, that quote comes instinctively to mind. Each pair is smartly designed, well crafted, comfortable and very sexy.

Trained as a product designer at Smart Design, Razorfish, and her own company Able Design before segueing into the fashion world in the fall of 2009, she leverages her industrial design expertise by fusing hard-core functionality with unique sculptural possibilities to create some very impressive shoes.

“I think of shoes as little products or architecture for the feet—both share similar purpose of protection, organization, and personality,” says the designer. An expert at looking for solutions within a problem, she never loses sight of ways to keep the foot secure and the wearer confident, while at the same time innovating with form and experimenting with structure and materials.

“I look at where the foot needs to be supported and where it doesn’t—then how the materials and shapes can be arranged in an interesting way. I like a bit of tension—something unexpected—whether it’s in the proportions, compositions, or materials,” Davis says.

This past winter, Martha was a resident at the newly formed The Workshop Residence in San Francisco. This exciting collective engages makers of all kinds: emerging and established, traditional and unexpected, and invites them to collaborate with the Bay Area’s vibrant artistic and craft communities. During her residency there, she blended industry and craftsmanship to design three distinctive shoes. While all of the shoes use the same vegetable-tanned leather and have similarities in the shape and construction of the shoe, the key point of innovation is the design of the heel.

“Kasha” features a heel with colored resin and utilizes the outer part of a redwood tree trunk known as the “jacket”. This part of the tree is considered waste product by sawmills, but Martha envisioned this beautiful and striking substance as a way to give the shoes a truly bespoke feeling.

Kasha

For “Simone”, raw materials are carefully selected from the undulating folds of Black Acacia wood harvested in the San Francisco Bay.

Simone

Finally, “Sugi” has an adjustable heel made with repurposed Douglas Fir. Additionally she constructs the shoe with wood originally used as brakes for San Francisco’s iconic cable cars. Due to the wear and tear, the brakes on the cable cars are replaced every 72 hours. Martha resurfaced the brakes and cut the heels directly from them—the stunning result is a stylish oval that swivels on a pin to two heel heights.

Sugi

Martha is joining forces with creative director Susanna Dulkinys to create Dulkinys Davis, a new fashion label made in the USA. The collection will consist of basics centered around leather, blending traditional and innovation to create modern shapes and exceptionally high-quality, handmade products. More on their collaboration in a future post.

With out further ado, here’s my Q&A with the alluring and magical Martha Davis.

Job description: a forever student—i hope!

Why do you do what you do? i am a terminal non-linear thinker

How do you break through a creative block? look at stuff

Education: cornell art/arch/planning school: 82-84
risd: bfa sculpture 86
are sutoria: footwear engineering certificate 07

Mentors: my dad & tucker viemeister

World-saving mission: help people appreciate making things and live more self sufficiently

Office chair: Eames

Office Soundtrack: Italian opera

Most useful tool: apple air book/ husquvarna sewing machine i got as a gift when i was 17

Favorite space: the giardiniin venice

Favorite design object: paperclip

Guilty Pleasure: naps

Underrated: plumbing

Overrated: facebook

What did you learn the hard way? to love

If you could cross over into other profession… what would you do? be an architect or a surgeon

Dream project: to start a factory that could employ all kinds of people and give local vitality

Where’s home? san francisco



Fall 2011