Aliki van der Kruijs developed her new line of furniture textiles for Wolf-Gordon which just launched at NeoCon, through a series of totemic objects, each loaded with metaphoric meanings, textures, and patterns that recall her impressions of a faraway place.
During a porcelain residency in Arita, Japan, the Dutch designer was intrigued by a gridded kimono fabric that was “super simple, but also very detailed”—a double negative, where colors and patterns were reversed on either side, she explains. She applied the pattern to a porcelain vase with printed acetate, and the resulting overlaps and breaks in the grid caused by applying this infinite 2-D field onto a 3-D object created a delicate, feathery shading. Exploring a porcelain quarry, she collected discarded bits of porcelain, left behind in the wake of decades of thunderous strip-mine excavations that leveled a mountain. She wrapped them in the kimono grid as well, and began calling them her “Philosopher’s Stones.” Covered in a graceful fabric pattern, they’re an intimate, hand-held counterpoint to the spectacular violence of quarrying for resources. She still carries one with her. “I cannot just make an image,” says Krujis. “I create my worlds.”