Conversation Pieces

Stephen Burks: I hope that people can see my voice in the KIDA swing. I’m Stephen Burks. My studio is Stephen Burks Man Made, and we’re based in Brooklyn, New York.

Yeah, it’s my introspective chair, let’s say, I sit there when I want to be quiet and think. The swing is a very interesting typology because, of course, it is defined by your feet on the ground. I thought about the idea of it rotating in the air. I thought about it being a kind of minimal, open structure for supporting the body first and foremost. I started working on it when I was in Japan, and there was a Japanese fan that I thought was really interesting—it had a fairly minimal structure, and that structure’s infill was very beautiful and graphic.

Bethan Laura Wood: I’m Bethan Laura Wood and I’m a multi-discipline designer based in London. I was drawn to working with the, the design universe because of its physicality.

It’s an area of creativity that connects or interacts with everybody every day in some form from your home, your toothbrush, your shoes… they’re the things that we surround ourselves with, that we fall in love with. And I think I’ve always been drawn to the challenge and the beauty in making and exploring all the things that inhabit that kind of space.

Fernando Laposse: When you look into anthropology, and we try to decipher how civilizations were living thousands of years ago, you look at their functional objects are at the way they were eating, the way they were sitting, the way they were living. I think it’s a very powerful way of just recording time, and the state of our society. My name is Fernando Laposse and I am an artist and designer. I’m based in Mexico.

Bethan Laura Wood: A chandelier is, is normally a very fancy-pantsy center light. I definitely want to play with this idea of fantasy within the thing. Criss Cross Kite is a chandelier that I make in collaboration with an artisan called Pietro Viero, an amazing glass artisan based in Vicenza. And for me, borosilicate has always been a fascinating glass because it’s incredibly thin and incredibly light and incredibly strong. The kite is made from these cores, which are the tube itself. And the length of those tubes generally can only go as long as Pietro’s arm because he hand-blows. So it’s, it’s this conversation between the industrialized, uniform forms that you get from Pyrex being in these preset tube diameters, and then the narrative of the physicality of Pietro.

Fernando Laposse: I think craft is never static.

Stephen Burks: What if we look to the rest of the world? What if we learn from indigenous practices? What if we learn from age-old wisdom? And what if we allow those voices and those techniques and those ways of making to have an impact on what design is?

It’s so important that I actually go and work with the artisans because we discover things along the way and I learn from them as much as they learn from me and the contribution changes the work, right? The weaving factory is based in Cebu in the Philippines, and we believe that the more times an object is touched by these master craftsmen, the more value that it’s given.

Fernando Laposse: I’d like to use my platform as a designer to push ideas that are more complex and that go beyond, you know, just buying something that is cool, or something that is reproducible in the hundreds of thousands. So, you know, it will always stay very close to craft and to art.