BEHIND THE DESIGN
Our Column Collection is loosely drawing from art historical motifs inspired by nature that can be found in cultures spanning time and place. We, too, created the forms from instinct, then realized their universality and found the connection worth exploring.
SERPENTINE
Many variations of a folding serpent-like design were present in the visual languages of ancient cultures spanning the globe. Ancient Mesoamerica, the Zhou and Han Dynasties of China, and Early Celtic art, to name a few, often used a serpentine motif to represent the creature we might call a dragon or feathered serpent. Out of their connection to and observation of nature alone, many cultures that never crossed paths created folklore and spiritual rituals around a similar mythical being that combined the qualities of a bird and a snake.
CYCLADIC
The Cycladic figurines of the Bronze Age were some of the earliest examples of geometric angularity in the history of sculpture, a style of abstraction that has been ever-present in artworks globally spanning thousands of years. The earliest figurative sculptures were small in scale because as nomadic peoples, they needed to be able to carry their possessions with them. Our cycladic candle reminds us of the angularity and the handheld scale of the figurines from the Cyclades Islands, but similar small-scale anthropomorphic sculptures have been attributed to many other nomadic groups of the Bronze Age across all of the inhabited earth.
BOULE
As the simplest of the forms, the Boule candle’s repeating bubble-like curves are reminiscent of many naturally occurring shapes like that of pooling water, egg sacs, pregnancy and stalactites. In the history of arts & crafts, it is most similar to that of beadwork. Many ancient cultures used beadwork and beaded strands as part of their regalia. The beads were either constructed from clay made by mixing mud with mortar or they were made from locally gathered stones, jewels, and seashells. The Boule candle also reminds us of the woodworking style called Spool Turning, which was developed in England in the 16th century and popularized with furniture making. England carried this new technique over to their many global colonized locals, where each culture married the style with their own indiginous visual language to create something completely unique to themselves. Despite the unappealing association with colonial times, this wood turned style as a visual element has become part of the collective unconscious and evolved into a plurality of design forms over the centuries.
VESSEL
Like most ancient objects, the vessel or vase did not begin as a purely decorative object. Early cultures formed containers from the materials available to them in order to transport water from an adjacent source to their small community. Over time, the bulbous vessel took on many variations of its form but universally remained with a bulging center and mouth-like opening at the top. These proportions have often been compared to that of the human figure, a form that is also widest toward the center and tapered at the top and bottom. Vessels would often be embellished with the stories of the community, reading along the horizontal axis as if a scroll around a column.