Creating Space with Simone Bodmer-Turner and Emma Scully
Simone Bodmer Turner and Emma Scully at Scully’s gallery. Courtesy of Emma Scully.
Creating Space with Simone Bodmer-Turner and Emma Scully
Artist and designer Simone Bodmer-Turner and Gallerist Emma Scully discuss the blurring lines between design and art, true patronship and their most recent show.
By Bonnie Langedijk
Space has many meanings. From the space we live in, to Outer space to the blank area that separates words and sentences in writing. The spaces we inhabit have a deep influence on how we act, think and show up in the world. Artist and designer Simone Bodmer-Turner and collectible design gallerist Emma Scully understand that deeply. For their latest project, ‘A Year Without A Kiln’, Bodmer-Turner explored a new iteration of her practice during a time of great transition. The exhibition features furniture and other functional objects created by Bodmer-Turner. Lighting inspired by Bodmer-Turner’s lifelong muses Alexander Calder and Diego Giacometti, side tables designed in collaboration with Massachusetts-based woodworker Laura Pepper and urushi lacquer artist Yuko Gunji and a standing screen crafted from silk-wrapped steel. Paired with Scully’s distinct curatorial eye, the gallerist has crafted an experience that’s much more than a show.
But this wasn’t the first time Bodmer-Turner and Scully’s paths crossed. The two women first met during Salone del Mobile, a collaboration on a six foot by eight foot mirror for Scully’s first project 'Reflecting Women’ at Design Miami followed – featuring commissioned mirrors by various female designers. During a group show at Frieze's No. 9 Cork Street in London – where Scully commissioned Bodmer-Turner to create a standing lamp for the show – the two women discussed materials, specifically bronze. Around the same time, Bodmer-Turner moved from her apartment and studio in Brooklyn, New York to a New England farmhouse and orchard in Massachusetts, without her trusted kiln – the primary tool to her practice. It created the distance needed for the artist and designer to experiment with new materials including bronze, wood, lacquer and silk. Further exploring her own creative practice while in dialogue with what it means to craft a home, and how space influences the creative process. The experience and the works that came from it, are brought together at Emma Scully’s gallery in ‘A Year Without A Kiln.’ And Scully’s eponymous gallery is the perfect location to explore the sense of home. Located in a 19th Century townhouse on the Upper East Side, the gallery is known for its unique approach to showcasing collectible design. Through its architecture, the gallery redefines what a gallery looks like, and the context in which design is showcased. Deeper than just the location itself, Scully has built a reputation for creating space for artists to further explore their practice and push their boundaries. It’s why so many of today’s leading artists – including EJR Barns, Rooms Studio and Jane Atfield – flock to the gallery to showcase their work within an environment that feels like their own. But we’ll let Simone and Emma do the talking.
Winged Andirons, crafted from polished bronze and iron. Photography by William Jess Laird.
Square Lacquer Tables made in collaboration with Laura Pepper and Yuko Gunji and the Silk Peaked Standing Screen. Photography by Marco Galloway.
HURS: Space impacts many parts of our everyday life. How does space influence your way of being and the creative process?
Simone: The machine of the city demands this amount of productivity. Being here [in Massachusetts] has allowed for the dust to settle and for me to get uncomfortable in the quiet. Emma has watched me shed the layers of rigidity around my practice and become more accepting of spreading into areas that I used to tell myself ‘wasn’t my way of working.’ I guess that's more the mental space rather than the physical space. I'm in a very old-school New England town with stone walls, an orchard, and an amazing community of neighbors. It's been incredibly enriching and healing to be touched back into a place where people still live the way that they used to live. It's also very much a do-it-yourself environment. That kind of mentality also gave me permission to reach out to these people and ask, ‘I know you haven't worked this way before, but would you be willing to?’ People are curious about these strange New Yorkers in their midst.
Emma: My space is unusual for a design gallery. I'm on the Upper East Side, in a historic townhouse. In terms of presenting design, the exhibition space has allowed us to lean into residential architecture as a frame for our exhibitions. I’ve found it exciting when artists have taken over the space and made it their own. There's an intimacy about the exhibition room that allows it to feel different than a white box on a plinth presentation. We've had solo exhibitions for Rafael Prieto, EJR Barnes, and Rooms Studio, and all of them had very different but intensive exhibition designs with the room's architecture in mind. People will feel the same about Simone's exhibition design.
Simone: Being coupled with this domestic investment in my life, the work is very much intended to be lived with, whereas how I've worked in the past was more of an exploration of the many possibilities offered by the process. I’d think “in my complete imagination, what would an expression of a credenza or a standing lamp be?” I got a bit tighter in this show by questioning what I want to live with for my entire lifetime and hand down to my children. Of course, they're sculptural, but they're functional first. Before, I was working with sculpture at the forefront and function afterward. There’s that shift that has very much been influenced by Emma's space as well as my own.
“I got a bit TIGHTER in this show by questioning what I want to live with for my entire lifetime and hand down to my children. Of course they're sculptural, but they're functional first. ”
HURS: This show must be a very personal one for you, Simone? You didn't have your kiln and you relocated from New York to Massachusetts.
Simone: At the beginning I was very much floundering and questioning: how do I make work? Now I have a tiny kiln that at least allows me to do a little bit, but at the beginning, I didn't have anything. That just turned my entire creative process on its head. Even the model making for all of the interior projects I do in ceramic. It's how my brain and my hands are able to translate shape. I have to work a combination of reductive and additive, which clay is so wonderful for. I was a little bit lost at the beginning but I had the prompt of this show, which was intimidating at first. I wondered how I was ever going to create a show with such limited means around materials. Then it just started coming together. As we found certain fabricators who were willing to have a dialogue around what could be possible and didn't mind educating me a bit about the process of how something goes from ceramic or plaster, to wax, to bronze and all the multiple steps of molding between that. One of the amazing things about you, Emma, even
when I would ask you what to do, you wouldn’t tell me. It made the show very personal. It really came out of this land, the space, the kind of architecture of the area, and the craftsmanship that the area has historically been known for.
Emma: The show most importantly was about creating work Simone and I both believed in and that felt authentic to Simone. Despite the challenges of this show being all new materials for her, creating beautifully made pieces that were a piece of the picture of her career. In a moment where Simone herself was not going to be the craftsperson, we both became doubly committed to fabrication.
The art of cooking by Rose Chalalai Singh. Photography by Martin Bruno.
Playground Standing Lamp. Bronze base, silk shade. Photography by William Jess Laird.
HURS: Ahead of this conversation, I was thinking about the overlap in your philosophies. Both of your practices are quite hard to box in. Did you try to intentionally move outside of the perimeters that are set in that world of art and design? And do you think those lines between disciplines will disappear in the future?
Emma: There's a generation of design gallerists ahead of me, in New York City particularly, who fought their way out of the flea market. My generation of people who specialize in collectible design, we sit on the shoulders of their work. We still have a long way to go in what we do as a field, but I’m optimistic. The larger design industry has been creating a worse and worse product for so many years. I like to compare what we do to the organic food movement and the slow food movement. What's being made for the mainstream is like fast food. When you understand that, you can understand how intensive it is to fight that machine. In terms of the artistic importance of design, I don't value art or design one above the other. In terms of the practicalities of bringing important design into the world, there's a lot of complexity. A lot goes into fabricating and realizing collectible designs.
Simone: Design can be even more challenging because it has to be functional. It can't collapse underneath you or fall apart and still be considered good design. It doesn't just sit on a wall to never be touched. It's even more challenging to design something with function that still is conceptual, which is the place I'm trying to design from.
Emma: As a designer you know that your client will have an ongoing physical interaction with your work. You have to anticipate that and the client’s needs in that use.
HURS: It reminds me of this exhibition about Enzo Mari at the Design Museum in London. He believed that if you as a person were invested in how something has been made, you care about it more.
Simone: Completely. All the pieces in the show are crafted out of quite literally my own personal need. Very simply, I'm just extremely curious about so many materials, so many ways of working, both that enter into the commercial space and enter into the fine art space and everything in between. Having a diverse practice means resilience. You will always be stimulated and there's always going to be the ebb and flow of the way that people are interested in your work or not interested in your work. I hope that having many ways of working that cross all these different lines means that I get to do this work for my whole life.
Simone Bodmer-Turner holding her Tadpole Bowl crafted from polished bronze. Photography by William Jess Laird.
A Year Without A Kiln at Emma Scully Gallery. Photography by William Jess Laird.
HURS: There’s a growing group of people who are interested in collectible design. Social media has allowed them to deepen their knowledge about craft and certain design pieces and explore designers and galleries. But it’s also created this shift where some design pieces have become it-products. Simone, I remember you were one of the first designers who was stocked by numerous fashion retailers. From the outside looking in, it seemed like this explosive interest in your work. What was that like for you? And from a wider perspective, how do you think social media has impacted the way people look at and purchase design?
Simone: It was so strange for it to happen that way, because at that time I really identified more with being a craftsperson than a designer, and the way it took off was unexpected and very unusual for a person working in ceramics. I had some great collaborators who brought my work on and wrote features, sharing it with a much bigger audience than I would have had access to on my own. It gave me a platform for the first time to scale up my practice, and then once I had a team, I got more curious and experimental in my personal practice. When I shifted my practice to scale back in this time of transition, I needed to create a bit of distance from that work that had had so much momentum to make space for the creation of other work that was more tethered to what I was currently experiencing. I didn't want to scale up to the extent that I would outsource the production to another country and become a monolith, so I put that part of my work on pause until I found a solution I could get behind, and instead worked towards this show.
Emma: Going back much farther than social media, there's been an interest in people having wonderful things in their home and thinking about design and collecting design. People now have access to a really broad reach of imagery, artists and makers. But social media has also created it-pieces, especially in the vintage market. I hope that we can, instead of having everybody say buy this De Sede sofa and then next year want to collect this other vintage piece, develop an interest in a period and go to that next step in collecting. It's the same in the contemporary market. It's not just about one piece, it's about who the artist is, their body of work. Having one piece that's really popular as an artist is wonderful, but anyone who is creative is not just going to want to make the same piece over and over again. Understanding that and being willing as a collector to support the breadth of somebody's career, different kinds of objects and the designer's own process and evolution as an artist, is part of being a patron and a collector.
Simone: Even though I'm a maker rather than the buyer, for me even having social media focus on this body of work and having that take off, meant that all of a sudden I started to form more relationships in the design sphere. I didn't know that much about design at the time. I knew a little bit about architecture, a little bit about design, but I came from more of a craft background. I hope that people use social media as a beginning point. It introduces you, it begins to form connections. It begins to form a curiosity about a material or a designer or a period and grows into more informed collecting and patronship.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
