Meet The Maker | Studio Furthermore
Ahead of the opening of PAD London, we caught up with Iain Howlett of Studio Furthermore whose work will be on show at the fair's 2024 edition. The Studio’s work can also be found in the permanent collections of the Vitra Design Museum, The MAK Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna and the CID Grand Hornu in Belgium. In 2025 their Moon Rock project will be permanently installed on the Moon with the Moon Gallery in collaboration with ESA.
Please tell us about your journey into the world of art, design and craft, and the unique perspective you bring to it.
It was clear to me from a really young age before I knew what design or craft was, this is what I would do. It came into sharp focus over time and particularly during my RCA years. Marina and I started to collaborate soon after graduating and formalised our studio in 2015. Our work is deeply informed by processes that occur in nature such as lava stone from volcanic activity or how mountains are formed over many years. Nature creates the most beautiful forms, albeit uncontrolled, and this is what we try to achieve in our work. In traditional design there is a tendency to control and perfect every aspect of production and outcome but we try to create work with process and feeling. For us the outcome is a result and not an expectation.
How do new ideas emerge for you and what is the process for developing them into finished pieces?
We both have intuitions which we tend to sketch or talk about. For us ideas are fast but we often work on longer projects like Moon Rock which took years to develop so many ideas can influence the outcome of a single project and a single project can have numerous outcomes. We produce drawings, material samples, models and collect lots of material that builds towards a collection of finished pieces. Moon Rock is ongoing so we will keep adding to the collection over time.
Which materials do you each enjoy working with most and why?
We are lucky enough to work with our own materials which we have created. They are not materials within their own right but rather variations of materials such as our metal and ceramic foams. We also love to work with glass, and light is something we treat as a material, an immaterial material, but something that can be worked and shaped nevertheless. We are drawn to transformative materials and materials which are enduring.
We’d love to hear more about the inspiration for the Moon Rock project and how it feels to be sending artwork to the moon.
The Moon Rock project grew out of our ceramic foam work. We wanted to create furniture scaled work but our porcelain foam is better suited to hand scaled pieces so we started to explore the possibilities of creating our own metal foam process. We created the process first and looked at geological processes occurring in the natural world such as volcanology which forms and shapes planets all over the universe. Volcanoes are like massive crucibles that spew out weird and wonderful materials. There were many iterations of the process before we perfected it but then we took the steps to rework it so the outcome is 100% recycled from car wheels meaning no new material is required cutting out mining and around 90% of the energy required in the production of new aluminium.
Looking up at the Moon it all seems so far away and even hard to imagine someone setting foot on the surface let alone imagine something I made will go there and be preserved for a very long time. But I have come to think of it like Everest, there was a time before anybody set foot on the summit and one afternoon that changed. Now in climbing season long queues of people wait their turn to summit. Soon the Moon will be a busy place, probably sooner than many of us expect and I think that’s the point. We created a cobalt porcelain hybrid material and produced a tiny Moon Rock table for the occasion.
Where do you go from there? What will you be working on next?
We are presenting our work on a global stage now with PAD London and Design Miami coming up soon for example. It’s invigorating to experience how new audiences interpret our work. We are creating larger scale pieces and have some bronze foam pieces also. We are most excited about what’s going on behind the scenes. As well as a shift in scale we are thinking about some more advanced processes to form the next generation of our work.
Find out more at www.studiofurthermore.com
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