ALIEN
Russ Fogle
Industrial RitualThe ancient craft technique of coil-building has recently been appropriated by 3D printing machines. In an attempt to reclaim the process for handcraft in modern materials, I present Industrial Ritual, a three-part traditional gaiwan tea set hand-welded in stainless steel. It is a painfully slow, organic process which directly informs the texture and form of the work, evoking both the contemporary and the timeless.
Dan McMahon
Paper Lamp 03This lamp comes from ongoing studies exploring the creation of three dimensional surfaces made from nothing but plant fiber (paper). Over-beaten pulp is sprayed out of an air gun onto costom collapsible armatures. The surface is built up slowly in layers to achieve a thickness that is self-supporting but also thin enough to be an effective light diffuser. Once the paper is dry and the armatures are removed, the resulting object has an otherworldly appearance that confronts common expectations of what paper can be. The choice of Abaca fiber was made due to its strength and translucency. It’s also a fast-growing plant that is sustainably harvested.
Colin Knight
Elegy For Egon RissMade from leather and aluminum, this small bookcase responds to the story of the Mid-Century Architect Egon Riss during WWII. Reconstructing the narrative of his iconic design “Penguin Donkey”, the work explores the hardship and alienation faced by designers during times of global conflict and the effects of war on design.
The work now depicts the original “donkey” bookshelf as a dying animal, starving on its side. Constructed similarly to airplane wings, referring to the original designs' fleeting fame due to material rationing in England, stretched leather shows the rib-like structure of the animal. The small aluminum bookcase is located beneath a buckled leather flap, almost suggesting a piece of luggage, while requiring a somewhat invasive action to use it.
Kazuki Guzmán
Tools from ElsewhereTools From Elsewhere reimagines the traditional Japanese tawashi brush through hybrid forms that combine shuro (windmill palm) fiber with elements of Western-style brooms. While tawashi are ubiquitous in Japan, used daily in kitchens and workshops, they remain largely unfamiliar in the West. By merging these two familiar cleaning tools, the work produces objects that feel subtly out of place in both contexts. My connection to shuro is rooted in personal memory. Shuro trees lined the back of my grandparents’
home, and as a child I was struck by their tropical, palm-like appearance without fully understanding what they were. That moment, when something familiar reveals itself as foreign, continues to inform this work.
Each piece functions as a tool, yet resists immediate recognition. The tawashi becomes a handle, a head, or a structural element, while the broom form is interrupted or reoriented. These objects exist between
categories: neither fully Japanese nor Western, neither brush nor broom. Instead, they operate as cultural translations—everyday forms displaced just enough to become alien. The shuro components are produced in collaboration with craftspeople at Takada Tawashi in Japan and assembled with newly fabricated elements, bringing together traditional material knowledge and contemporary reinterpretation.
Adeye Jean Baptiste
Lamp #1I am interested in why people migrate. Within my work I present a perspective of those who are non-native to the environment that they have traveled to or through. I draw from both personal as well as generational
experience when building out my narratives. Aesthetically I am influenced by the cultures I grew up in such as graffiti, skate, and city. I am also influenced by the 1980s, the era in which my parents immigrated to the US.
“The Alien” or “Star people” is a common motif within my work. The Alien
becomes a metaphor for otherness. I use them as a way to tackle the challenges of movement in a non-direct way. While at first glance they may seem like these happy go lucky creatures when time is taken to peel back their visual layers there is something more. The wear and tear of their bodies capture a lived turmoil or the handmade knitted socks show that they were once deeply loved. It is these details that I use to really flesh out the deeper, more serious narrative. Lamp #1 is based on the pac-man ghost and traditional caribbean masks.
Gregory Buntain
Lithic Service No. 1Lithic Service No. 1 is a proposed collection of hand-carved Brazilian soapstone vessels that investigate the theme ALIEN through pure geometry, ancient symbolism, and material intelligence. Drawing on the precise, elemental geometry of pyramids and Platonic solids, the work occupies a threshold between human ritual objects and imagined artifacts of non-human origin. Each vessel is conceived as a functional relic from an unknown civilization, familiar in purpose, yet foreign in logic and presence.
Jess Fügler
StumpI often imagine an outsider’s perspective when encountering man-made constructs that feel needlessly perplexing, superfluous, or even slightly embarrassing. Stump emerged from one such moment. While discussing a set of chunky, cylindrical table legs, my woodworker described the process as “making round things square, back to round again.” The phrase stuck. It led me into the history of the U.S. lumber industry, where the absurdity only deepened: from the confusion of nominal versus actual dimensions, to the ecological consequences of early deforestation, to the peculiar logic of taking a naturally round material, cutting it into rectilinear forms, gluing it together, and turning it back into a cylinder.
Functioning as both stool and side table, Stump is made from ash laminated into a hollow block and turned into a cylindrical form. Throughout the piece, elements of adornment point to the human impulse to embellish and make meaning through surface. The exposed end grain reveals the intentional reassembly of the material, emphasizing the hand of the maker. Inlaid silver motifs draw from Ukiyo-e forms— a Japanese art movement that depicted nature, an art form that grew popular in the West at a time when American forests were being rapidly depleted and the lumber industry expanded westward.
Eliot Wolfert
Bio Composite Shell No.3Bio Composite Shell No. 3 is made from solely organic substances: cotton infused with a proprietary blend of tree saps, waxes, and naturally occurring oils. The result is a semi-translucent membrane with a yellow incandescent glow and soft white pebbling. It appears familiar yet foreign, like something grown, tamed, and distilled rather than manufactured. Its surface behaves like a living cuticle of a leaf, its waxy and oily presence interacting with the host’s own skin in a state of mutually beneficial symbiosis. In harsh conditions, the composite interacts with the wearer’s skin, releasing oils that lightly condition their skin.
In a blur of past and present, future fantasy, this piece evokes an eerie sense of melancholy with a feeling of distinct foreignness and otherworldliness. I imagine the garment as an artifact from a world adjacent to ours, where beings patrol the lands and protect themselves from harsh radiation in translucent, leaf-like cloaks to allow them to hunt and prowl in an ozone that differs from ours in ways we wouldn’t be able to understand.
Dan Michalik x Emrys Berkower
In Praise of New ForestsThese vessels are a statement on the power of material dialog, and a celebration of natural life systems. Cork is a truly regenerative material with astounding thermal characteristics. Glass was formed into scultpural cork molds which created a unique surface on the glass. The vessels were then re-introduced with cork, such that they can provide spaces for life to
grow, in the form of fledgling cork tree saplings.