At Gallery FUMI's Design Miami booth, each work carried intimate narratives rooted in ancestral tradition and cultural heritage. Through the hands of their respective designers and artisans, the exhibition pieced together a diverse lineage of design practices bursting with bright colors and organic shapes.
The NY-based gallery debuted Charlotte Kingsnorth's "Land Before Time," an unconventional writing desk and chair resembling the crackled skin of a prehistoric reptile. Kingsnorth evoked the Jurassic era with a patchwork of green leather pieces applied to her signature amorphous cushioning. The new work is reminiscent of recent projects from her studio like the Shim Shimmy Chaise, which included prominent green feet complete with toenails.
Through the years, the English artist has developed a series of upholstered furnishings with unique anthropomorphic sensibilities, often reflected in her consistent adaptation of existing chairs consumed in globs of meticulously crafted upholstery. Her unique design aesthetic has caught the eye of big-name clients like Tyler the Creator who commissioned a set of chairs for his dining room earlier this year.
Her work's title "Land Before Time," evokes a primordial state of the planet, when human aspirations for regularity, certainty, and precision hadn't taken over the globe. This suggestion of organicism is immediate in Kingsnorth's piece, with the irregular thicknesses of its odd-numbered legs. In this era when humans look to artificial intelligence to streamline, perfect, and even predict outcomes, Gallery FUMI's curation challenges this impulse with its ancestral and archaic inspirations.
At the other end of the booth, totemic sculptures by Casey McCafferty drew inspiration from ancient Norse mythology. On the walls, Emma Witter's work utilized an antique mirror decorated with flowers formed from salvaged animal bones, while Jie Wu's mirrors utilized salvaged bronze originating in the Song dynasty. Towards the center of the booth, Tuomas Markunpoika utilized Tadelakt, an ancient Morrocan plaster to sculpt the curvilinear forms of the Contra Naturam Bookshelf.
See the images of Gallery FUMI's full installation in the gallery above, along with detailed shots of Charlotte Kingsnorth's "Land Before Time."
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