As we approach the latest installation of Collect Art Fair, the brilliant makers bringing an artful touch to our surroundings come to the forefront. In anticipation of the wonders to come, we’re shifting our focus to a few of Tom’s personal favourite craftspeople. At TF we place a lot of stock in the art of making, approaching each piece of furniture with patience and attention to detail. We handle our own designs with a craftsman’s eye, making every one by hand in our Wiltshire workshop using only the best materials to ensure they will stand the test of time and taste. Tom enjoys collecting artful objects that bring a lift not only to his own homes, but to our showrooms. The addition of a beautifully executed ceramic or piece of fine metalwork, for example, brings an added bit of complexity and intrigue to the overall effect of a TF piece. To get you started on bringing craft into your home, we’ve drawn together a few of Tom’s favourite makers with a unique touch for crafting original objects of beauty…

 

Akiko Hirai

 

Akiko Hirai has become celebrated for her individual approach to ceramics. Her work embodies a traditional Japanese ethos, allowing the clay to reveal its natural beauty and indicate formal direction as it’s worked. Her pieces are straightforward in form, finding distinction through texture as she builds up layer after layer. She strikes the perfect balance, only to relinquish it to the infernal forces of the kiln. This is where the true intrigue lies – in the letting go and allowing a piece to unfurl into its own unique final form. Her process draws in elements of the Shibui tradition, whereby the truth of imperfection is favoured over the carefully contrived. The result is a diverse cast of unique ceramics and tableware that hold their own identities as objects formed not only by the hand and by the forces of nature and chance.

 

 

Adam Steiner

 

Adam Steiner and Tom share a material, reimagining natural and manmade forms into works of metal for the new age. Some of Adam’s work is useful, serving to light a space, for example. Others are purely decorative, crafted out of a conversation with the material which brings forth the unique, multifaceted qualities innate in metal. It is strong, yet it will yield; it is stark, yet not without character. Tom took a shine to Adam’s work and visited his studio in Paris, exchanging views on the endlessly captivating qualities of this age-old material, as well as stoking a shared enthusiasm for the many possibilities it poses for the future.

 

 

Eric Charles Donatien

 

Eric Charles Donatien is a plumassier; he works with feathers to artfully adorn everything from clothing to furniture. In the past, he’s worked with various fashion greats (Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, and Dior may ring some bells). He’s even outfitted big names like Beyoncé and Nicole Kidman. At first glance, haute couture and metal furniture may not immediately overlap, though Tom was struck by the possibilities that could arise from a certain contrast between the light, ornate appeal of feathers and the sleek, clean-cut quality of metal. What emerged was a collaboration whereby Eric Charles adorned our flagship Capricorn Dining Table as well as Tiffany Dining Chair with an artfully crafted display of feather work. He even forged some of the feathers from metal, creating a modern facsimile to rival the natural originals. This intermingling elicited a unique interchange between materials and form. The final products were revealed at London Design Festival, offering something that was entirely fresh both to Tom and Eric Charles. Together they created something new which lay at the intersection of two established traditions of craft.

 

 

FIVE Collective

 

Tom was stopped in his tracks when he first encountered the work of FIVE Collective at London’s Collect Art Fair last year. There was an instant connection forged by a shared material, coupled with a thought-provoking divergence of scale and function. There are five craftspeople who make up the group: Ane Christensen, Jessica Jui, Hamish Dobbie, Angela Cork, and Shen Zhang. They all come from different backgrounds, working with their medium in captivatingly diverse ways. Whether it’s a humble metal wire or a precious gold, they treat the starting point with equal respect, working carefully to reveal its innate beauty by bending their practice to suit its wiles and produce objects with distinctive characters. They are made to a much smaller scale than most of our creations, demanding different techniques, though encapsulating a similar attention to detail, form, and proportion. We found there was a fascinating dynamic to be struck between their work and ours, provoking an intriguing exchange between two treatments of a shared material.

 

 

Last year we worked with FIVE Collective to put on a week-long event over Craft Week. Members of the collective took up residence in our Lots Road showroom to demonstrate their craft and display their creations. The week culminated in a thought-provoking discussion between Tom and FIVE’s Ane Christensen. This year, we’re teaming up again to display our work side-by-side over the course of Collect, as well as building off Tom and Ane’s discussion with a second conversation taking place on Friday, 3^rd March at 3pm. We look forward to uncovering new similarities in our work and unearthing points of difference to make both of us think that little bit harder about how we may best approach craft through a certain layering of practice and perspective. We hope you’ll join us at London’s Somerset House from 3^rd – 5^th March as we unveil all that this layering of approaches has to offer.

 

 

 

 

Text by Annabel Colterjohn