The British designer Grace Prince’s Gestural Assembly series is a labor of love, a fruit of her extended hours at the studio, sitting alone with the materials. “Looking, adjusting, and looking again,” Prince explains the process. After spending a year to “refine” some of the earlier works, titled Unsettled Balance, the sculptures emerge faster from the designer’s hands. “I can trust my instincts more,” she says. Still, however, each gesture is a carefully taken step, a purposeful attempt, because “the result of a concluded piece cannot be re-managed.” All along, the design is an open-ended ritual to thrive on for Prince: “the continued exploration comes via researching new ‘suspended-movements’ illustrated in the title of each collection.”
Read our interview with Grace Prince on the occasion of her drop, Unsettled Balance 1, available on Concept.
Tell us about gestural assembly—how do you subvert the inherent “gesture” of making in your furniture?
The method starts with preliminary 2D collages; I use cut-outs of pre-existing forms to transfer the memory of the chosen sensation. The designs are then brought into physical works through a series of gestures, light juxtapositions of material and form. It is a slow sensory process with the perceptive outcome of speed and chance. I often explain it like a haiku in 3D, dedicated to the expression of much within the fewest possible compositional attempts. My practice is under my name Grace Prince, but it is this specific method essential to my practice that I call Gestural Assembly.
Chance is a factor you anticipate in your process, and it’s almost a taboo notion in furniture design. How do you embrace chance in your work?
I don’t perceive chance or risk as factors in my work—quite the contrary, I act as the operator of gestures, meaning to have a strong dialogue with the materials and forms. They provoke me to adapt the texture, subtract an element or deviate a line. This is to say during the making process there is a deep consideration in each decision, a constant push and pull operation. Pushing towards fulfilling the entropic desire, which I think is a common interest instilled in childhood nostalgia, and pulling back to a concrete functional state. The result is a suspension of actions, of gestures, concluded and harnessed together through a satisfying tension in form. Nothing is by chance, although it may seem that way.
Unsettled Balance thrives in its potential of collapse. Could you tell us your relationship with destruction?
My practice is essentially researching entropic sensations. I want to freeze a movement in the understanding that an object becomes more poetic in the suspense of entropy or collapse. But it crucially remains as a permission, not an action, the final pieces are solid and sturdy and of course functional.
What are your techniques of subverting design’s relationship with the sensory? Touch is given, but how do you flirt with other sensory experiences?
Juxtaposing is a rough way to put things together, yet I feel it is the most honest. The motive behind my work is to contrive light juxtapositions; delicate placements, which to me is a more powerful way to trigger an overall sensory experience. I want to leave an imprint of a feeling that is decipherable but not overly explicable.
Developing Gestural Assembly must have included many trial and errors. Could you talk about the process of composing this method?
I have been collaging works since I was at the university, and it was my professor who came up with the name Gestural Assembly in reference to the collages I was showing her. When I entered the industry after graduating, it became something that I needed to express. I was finding a specific aesthetic feeling through my collages, a certain nostalgia that I needed to explore in the physical more. Over the years, this meditative pattern of work has been refined to the point of knowing by looking and most importantly feeling. I have made quite a few pieces that I have never shown as a result of this refinement.
Is it a work in progress? Are you constantly exploring new paths to transform the series?
Individually a work in progress is not possible because it would negate the specific aim of assembly, which is to reach the pinnacle tension associated with the sensation I am examining.
How is your relationship with the virtual realm? As a designer how do you see the future of design in the cyber space?
It’s exciting to live in times where the virtual realm is expanding at such a pace, and what that can bring to design. Of course, furniture will always be an essential living tool, and a crucial way of enhancing the mood of the offline space, a space I have a feeling will need to be more and more ‘information-thin’ to counter the ‘information-thick’ cyberspace, which facilitates a new branch of design potentialities. This is not to say design should be stripped down, but with strength in the purity of essence and sensation.
Finally, the question I ask everyone. What does concept mean to you in your creative process? What stage do you consider as the concept and where do you go from there?
The concept comes after researching or often stumbling upon an undiagnosed movement—for example, last year, during trips abroad or around the city I live in, I started noticing makeshift structures, in particular cases positioned and viewed behind glass, which seemingly conserved them from the possibility of collapse. Moments of material spontaneity achieved with a sense fragility, but unreachable thus ‘unbreakable’. In this case, I named it Static Fragility, which became my most recent collection.
