Found Space Tiles by Stephanie Davidson
As an architect I often ask myself, how can this surface, this wall or floor, give more? What more can it give? In answering this question, I have produced a series of ceramic tile prototypes – tiles that reach out to be touched.Much like appropriating found objects, in my work I use the found spaces between bodies and architectural surfaces, and turn them into positive forms. The design process is incidental; the forms happen, they aren’t sculpted or orchestrated. The resulting tiles are a formal hybrid between two very necessary and basic architectural elements, the body and the wall. Part body and part wall, the tiles echo the presence of a person, a posture, and literally reach-out to touch and be touched.
What these tiles give is a reference to the human body, embedded in a building material. The tiles encourage direct physical interaction; through touching and leaning, bodies find new niches for support, undulating folds and protrusions for resting, stimulating pressure points, or simply fitting like a garment – a new-found intimacy.
In my process of form or space finding, I’ve used fabric formwork to cast or fill the negative gaps between bodies and walls. The finished tiles, after being materially translated into ceramic, freeze a posture, a moment of body-wall contact, as well as the behaviour of fabric – stretching or bulging in response to the pressure of the body and the weight of the plaster. The tiles play with the senses, appearing still soft and responsive.
Made in posture and/or body-specific clusters, the tiles are designed in standard finished dimensions, to be incorporated into standard tiled walls. This series of prototypes has been made to be integrated into a standard and inexpensive 15 x 15cm tile surface.
Research and prototypes for Found Space Tiles were made during a residency for architecture + ceramics at the European Ceramic Work Centre (ekwc) in s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, October 2007 – February 2008. They were exhibited in the designboom mart at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in NY in May 2008, and have been recently added to materia.nl, a well-known web-database of new and innovative architectural materials. Found Space Tiles will be produced by the Dutch ceramics company Corunum and will be available in August 2008.
- Ondine
{ 3 } Comments
I think “Found Space Tiles” by Stephanie Davidson represents pertaining images of new evaluation of the core
subject – life and modernity. This evaluation may deal with historical data, any artefacts from the past and thus reveal symbolism in XX century. It is an accomplished vivid image of the present time. However it also adheres to main tendencies in culture and art, design, so that I will assert that this artwork is the mere obscurity regarded by its creator to fill in the “ideological gap” through perfection of its cultural form, which is a considerable breakthrough on the whole, in my view.
It is true that the notion of “space finding” in this abstraction is regarded by me as an actual
recognition of the basics of artistic style of the author
introduced in this artful design and such a core image of abstraction is the act of making up a new space for intercultural communication within communities, with a ceratin reference to mind and body: that is an exchange of new ideas and principles in order to emphasize the unambiguous vision and process fo life.
However I reckon that these tiles as a new designer’s creative product are concerned with self-expression of Stephanie Davidson and therefore remind of a sensuous opposition against violence, rejection of the use of physical violence in the world. Pacifism might be considered one of the grounds of such a personal “intimate” view of moral values which are to be considered most important in modern society: that is a new spatial feature for advancing the cause of peace and advancing moral principles in observing the outer world, a person in it (a person in a subjectival concord with the world).