Julia Lohmann’s interest in design began during childhood walks with her father, during which they’d collect abandoned objects to create small figurines and creatures. In the past, her interest in the natural world centered on our relationship to animals as sources of food and materials (consider Flock, a series of translucent lights made of sheep’s stomachs, and Cow Bench, a boar-shaped leather bench she dubbed “a bovine momento mori”). Tidal Ossuary, which debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach and will be shown Feb. 5 – March 4 at the Jacqueline Rabun Gallery in London, continues the theme of elegant objects of beastly origins. For the exhibit—commissioned and financed by Gallery Libby Sellers—Lohmann and her partner, Gero Grundmann, created a series of vases from bones they discovered while walking along London’s river Thames. The relics’ location, when figured in with the water’s current, suggests that they were by-products from London’s Smithfield meat market, either thrown into the water or washed up from the city’s Victorian-era sewer system, which emptied into the river. Once deemed as rubbish, these remnants from meals long past have survived their supposed use-by-date and, now in Lohmann’s and Grundmann’s hands, return to objects of use and even greater worth.

Tags: Bones, Gero Grundmann, Julia Lohmann, Libby Sellers, Tidal Ossuary, Vases

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Architecture, Bones, Posted by Julie Taraska, Vases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.