Eight Artists Who Blur the Line Between Furniture and Sculpture

Liam Lee

Before the pandemic, I was working in set design for fashion photography. But then I got laid off, and started working with textiles—mainly out of convenience, it was something I could do in my apartment. I started making mohair tapestries, building up the surfaces with needle felting. Whereas traditional upholstered furniture involves foam or cotton batting, my pieces are solid, dense wool.

Eventually, they started becoming sculptural objects. We were all stuck in our homes, and I was thinking a lot about domestic objects, about how to bring elements of the natural world into my New York apartment. It took a few months, but I developed a method of building simple plywood chair frames, then adding volume with wool. With my shapes and colors, I get a lot of inspiration from mushrooms, flowers, and seed pods. At first, they were based closely on specific species, but I’ve stepped away from that and started getting loser.

Oren Pinhassi

I made a couch work, Lone and Level (2021), during the pandemic. I was watching people building snowmen in the park, which got me thinking about the human need to manipulate matter, to erect something from mud. I think it has a lot to do with playfulness and inventing impulses, but also mortality—this deep knowledge of one day returning to the ground. It made me want to sculpt with sand—I like that sand reminds us of our own fragility. It’s also both an agent and a product of erosion.

I made a couch based on the same one that I had at the time, a vintage Roche Bobois floorseating arrangement. You can arrange it in different ways; your guests sit on the ground, and it’s very sensual and intimate. I wanted to make something that was furniture but also landscape, like sand dunes. So I made clear vinyl cushions and stuffed them with sand. Moisture condenses inside, and I showed it alongside pillows that are made of sand and appear to grow erect from the landscape.

Toothbrush Tree (2020) is on view now in a show [loosely about art and furniture] called “Moveables” at the ICA Philadelphia. Here, again, I wanted to join architecture with nature. The leaves of the tree have oval holes that mimic wall-mounted toothbrush holders. The tree also suggests a big group of people coming together for a moment of oral care. There’s a certain sexual hint there, but more than that, it’s about imagining a world in which a group of people are participating in an act of tenderness and mutual care, exposing our sensitive cavities.

Chris Wolston

In my practice, the material takes the lead. It allows me to explore the histories of processes and techniques. Terra-cotta was the material that brought my studio to Medellín, Colombia, where I’m based. I got a Fulbright grant to study terracotta’s many roles in the local material culture here. You can pretty much dig it up in any handful of earth you grab, and process it into clay.

In 2014 I started making terra-cotta chairs that double as planters. Flowerpots are the first thing people tend to associate with that material. For my show “Flower Power” at Future Perfect earlier this year, I wanted to explore the visual nature of the Colombian landscape. I made whimsical versions of flowers, as well as works where I directly pressed different flowers into the clay, creating textures. Other forms are based on abstracted versions of landscapes. I collected plastic insects from dollar stores and cast them in bronze, so there are centipedes and ants crawling throughout these made-up landscapes. The chairs were very rigorous and technical—they all get fired as a single unit—but I wanted to mask that intense construction technique with this balloon animal–like form.

Dozie Kanu

For me, function is a conceptual tool. I find Black expression most often in dematerialized genres—oratory skills, dancing, sports—because the barrier for entry is lower, in terms of the investment needed. But I’m interested in the kinds of agency that Black people have in the material realm. I see the art world as an elitist space of expression. I’m interested in objects that everyone has to contend with. I didn’t grow up going to museums. In my neighborhood, people would express themselves by customizing their cars. My work often borrows from that Houston [Texas] slab culture: I’m making chairs out of concrete slabs, or rims.

In 2022 I made a public artwork, On Elbows, under the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s an intricate concrete cast of a chaise lounge, which alludes to psychoanalysis, to exploring back channels that impact the decisions you make on a daily basis. For me, slab culture was that kind of formative influence.

Chair xvi shows how my practice has evolved since I moved to Portugal in 2018. Here, in the countryside, I’m able to hoard, and that’s opened up my practice. I’ve been gathering objects from antique shops and junkyards, then bringing them back to the studio and waiting for them to tell me what they want to be. The chair is just two objects that I merged; then, I welded the feet. I think a lot about Portugal’s history and its role in the transatlantic slave trade. Arriving in Portugal felt like this weird triangle—my parents are Nigerian but immigrated to Texas, and now I’m here, finding pieces of these histories in the material culture.

Qualeasha Wood

After I made a trunk for Louis Vuitton, I got an email asking if I wanted to partner with Roche Bobois for a couch. I was like, “Me?!” Couches make me think about safety and familiarity, about my family and my friends. Plus, I’m always working on my couch! So I made a custom jacquard weave that reflects my desktop screen and wrapped Roche Bobois’s iconic bubble sofa. I lined it with crystal fringe and embellished it with gemstones. It took me back to my first interaction with luxury furniture, in the video game The Sims, where I was building dream homes that were different from the small apartment I grew up in.

I’ll never forget the day the couch was delivered to my house. There was a huge snowstorm and a paperwork debacle, so the delivery people couldn’t leave. As I was unwrapping the couch, they were like, “You did this?!” That was a big takeaway: working with everyday objects like furniture lets you have a conversation with people you might not expect. I want to inspire kids who, like me, come from backgrounds where art is not celebrated or accessible. I want them to know they can do anything.

Ficus Interfaith

We [Ryan Bush & Raphael Martinez Cohen] have been making work together under the moniker Ficus Interfaith for eight years now. Our studio practice is centered around terrazzo, and most of our pieces operate as paintings, though terrazzo is most commonly used for floors.

We’re always pushing what we can use as materials with terrazzo. We made one scented piece, Sidewalk Panel (2023), that incorporated a scented terra-cotta pomegranate made by the Italian perfume company Santa Maria Novella. We’ve also tried incorporating our own waste stream as aggregate, using everything from glass bottles to olive pits.

For Grandfather Clock (2022), we used bones as hands, and in the terrazzo. We thought they evoked the passage of time.

We love commissions, but working between art and design, I think people hesitate to bring ideas to us because they’re scared of stamping on our creative ego or something. But we work as a duo, so there’s been an ego death already. It’s a conversation, and that’s rewarding. Mostly, we receive cool ideas we would have never thought of on our own. In January, we’re opening a new show at Ethan Tate Gallery in Los Angeles with our first non-terrazzo tables—they’re glass.

Nicole Cherubini

The first furniture pieces I made were for a show at the Tang Teaching Museum [in Saratoga Springs, New York]. I was trying to figure out how to have viewers embody the space and embody my sculptures. My practice has always dealt with function and purpose, and eventually I thought, Why don’t I make something that actually works, after having referenced objects for so long? Also, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was really longing for physical presence.

For a long time, I’ve been thinking about how art and function intersect—I work in clay, a material that inherently has that conversation. But I think there’s a real distinction between function and purpose. Function is what the object does; purpose is why it does it. My work is about purpose.

I love that chairs invite rest. I made a series of ceramic chairs for a show at Tufts University. They have a collection of antiquities—objects that were given to them by wealthy board members. None have any provenance, and the university was trying to figure out what to do. They went through the legal processes. They also invited a few artists to come work with the collection and start a conversation. I silkscreened images of the patterns taken from the vessels onto ceramic chairs, and it became about having them sit and look—about having the time and rest to really understand these objects and reflect on the implications of having them at the university. I wanted viewers to understand themselves as a part of the pieces’ histories.

Gustavo Barroso

It’s funny how often you see someone wearing expensive designer clothes—someone who really cares about how they project themselves into the world—then you go to their house, and it’s disgusting and disorganized. I have the same problem. I was trying to understand this gap, and one of the main issues is that now, everyone has roommates until they’re 40, so they aren’t investing money in their space. I figured: why not make furniture more relatable to the average kid?

I sculpted some chairs in VR and then cut out the frames. Everything is made here in my studio. Fresh out of school, I worked a minimum wage job in an upholstery shop and learned a lot. Carrot Chaise is based on the proportions of Le Corbusier’s LC4, which is one of my favorite lounge chairs. This one was a collaboration with the LA brand Carrots by Anwar. It’s part of a series I did about finding comfort, and imagination.

Anwar goes pretty in-depth about what a carrot means to him. It’s a root vegetable—what are your roots? He’s a Black American; I’m a white Brazilian immigrant. My parents sold everything they had when they came to the US. They told me we were going to Disney World, and then we never returned. Disney was my introduction to America. I made another chair that looks like Mickey Mouse called Orlando Chair. It’s a tribute to my parents, who gave everything they had so I could pursue more opportunity.