Articolo Lighting’s Nicci Green

How One Designer Is Handling Australia’s Reopening

    Nicci Green is not new to global crisis. The designer founded Australian lighting maker Articolo Lighting when the Great Recession led to the demise of her previous glassware company, Bribe. “Pretty much overnight that business wasn’t relevant anymore” Green recalls. Standing at an empty Maison & Objet booth in 2010, “I held one vase on my hand upside down and another one on top of it and joked, ‘I don’t know—we could get into lighting.’” Today, Articolo is a global brand that operates showrooms in Melbourne and New York.

    This time around, when COVID-19 began to threaten small businesses, Green took a decidedly different tack. “We approached the coronavirus pandemic with a more positive perspective,” she says. Working with long time architect David Goss, Green prepared her local showroom for reopening after lockdown with projects that include a floor-to-ceiling installation comprising 90 glass spheres from Articolo’s Fizi product line. “It shows our ability to customize our lighting for larger scales and format,” Green says.

But the undertaking also inspired her to reflect more deeply on quarantine. “I thought, ‘What are we all going to be looking forward to?’ We will want to be together.” That thought led Green to start to seek out collaboration opportunities. Soon, Articolo began to commission new creative partners with gusto. The company produced a short film with Paris Thomson of SIRAP Motion Lab, and tapped illustrator Alex Watson to reimagine the lighting collections in a series of prints. Watson now works for Articolo one day per week.

    Now, some of these projects are being shared in Articolo’s Australian showrooms, as the country began reopening its economy in phases approximately a month before its American counterparts. Simultaneously, Green is finishing up a collaboration with digital media artist Yandell Walton that will transform her reopening into a spectacular event. Walton will amplify the Fizi installation’s presence by immersing visitors in motion graphics of bubbles. “When regulations allow us to have an event of 100 people, we’ll showcase this amazing digital art piece,” Green says. “COVID-19 gave us the quiet to explore this.”

The wider Melbourne community has used that time to similar ends. Interior designer Fiona Lynch launched an open-source platform for sustainable design called Future Archive during quarantine. And Green’s fellow designer Christopher Boots is welcoming clients to a new showroom that he created with interior designer Pascale Gomes-McNabb.

    Green, who is launching three new product collections this summer and hopes to expand her business to six showrooms worldwide by 2025, thinks her response to COVID-19 will inform her professional thinking for a long time. She feels particularly confident that Articolo’s future trade fair stands will more likely resemble a Walton-like environment than past booths, for one. But Green does not advise her American peers to necessarily parrot Melburnians as they navigate an eventual reopening. “It’s got to come from the heart,” she says. “If you try to orchestrate something just to capitalize on this moment, then you have a business proposition rather than an authentic expression.”

By David Sokol

published in :  articololighting.com

Articolo Lighting’s Nicci Green

Nicci Green is not new to global crisis. The designer founded Australian lighting maker Articolo Lighting when the Great Recession led to the demise of her previous glassware company, Bribe. “Pretty much overnight that business wasn’t relevant anymore,” Green recalls.Standing at an empty Maison & Objet booth in 2010, “I held one vase on my hand upside down and another one on top of it and joked, ‘I don’t know—we could get into lighting.’” Today, Articolo is a global brand that operates showrooms in Melbourne and New York.

ARCHISTYLE

ARCHISTYLE

   Frederico Babina is an Italian architect and graphic designer who creates artwork that focuses on the abstract replications of famous imagery and buildings. Through a strong focus on geometry and form his work represents a sense of innocence, inexperience and spontaneity throughout.

for his latest series ‘ARCHISTYLE’, Italian artist Federico Babina forms a categorical summary of some of the major architectural movements, expressed thorough simple graphic gestures.

the collection of 16 images illustrates the evolution and transformation of building styles from the last century from deconstructivism to art deco. the compositions are formed by minimal geometries, a deliberate use of color, mention of materials, typographic choices and drawn decorations.

‘architecture changes with society, follows the society, and sometimes guides it,’ says babina. ‘it’s easy to see the changes of the society through the mutation of the spaces we inhabit

walking through a contemporary city we can often observe sequences of buildings with different shapes, various styles and heterogeneous languages that coexist in an architectural (dis)order. they are like the pieces of a mosaic that relates the passage of time. it is not difficult to see an art deco building that touches a deconstructivist structure in a timeless embrace.’

published in : ARCHISTYLE – federico babina

ARCHISTYLE​

italian artist federico babina forms a categorical summary of some of the major architectural movements, expressed thorough simple graphic gestures. the collection of 16 images illustrates the evolution and transformation of building styles from the last century from deconstructivism to art deco. 

Paige Bradley

Paige Bradley – Sculptures in Bronze

     Paige Bradley is an American sculpture artist who gained fame for her figurative bronze works that were internally illuminated with electricity. Titled “Expansion”, the bronze sculpture depicted a woman sitting in a cross-legged position with light streaming from cracks in her body. This piece was originally photographed in 2004 against New York’s skyline, gaining international fame and putting Paige on the map.

      Paige Bradley’s (b. 1974) powerful sculptures of dynamically posed figures showcase more than just physical strength and passion – they testify to the inner strength and fortitude woven into the fabric of a person’s soul. Her own personal experiences are the starting point for Paige’s work, and she then uses her skill, intuition, and sensitivity to build these stories out into universally understood creations. The unseen and often unspoken dichotomies one encounters in life – joy and sorrow, dissonance and harmony, weakness and strength, ugliness and beauty – become powerfully alive in Paige’s sculpture, as she is an artist who has the rare ability to turn abstract feeling into three-dimensional form.

      Working in the figurative genre, Paige’s sculptures are anything but relics, antiques, or pastiches of figuration past. Rather, her works combine iconic media and uncommon skill with modern thought, philosophy, and psychology, speaking in the currency of our contemporary culture. Paige is also known for eschewing stylistic rules and parameters of any kind, which has kept stagnation far from her studio. In looking at the variety of thought-provoking work she has produced over her 25-year career, one can see how this mind set continues to serve her creative diversity: some of her figures sit strong and grounded in outdoor spaces; others float delicately in suspended compositions; others are sturdily wrapped in silk while stretching toward freedom. Although she primarily casts in bronze, Paige’s artwork also encompasses painting and charcoals, woodcuts, iron-bonded resin, aluminium, mixed media, or any other material she feels helps communicate her message.

in her own words

     “Inspiration comes from my connection to the world, my relationships with others, and my relationship with myself. I don’t need to travel the planet or hire dancers to find a muse. My individual journey is inspiration enough.Since I was nine years old I knew I would be an artist. I was drawing since I can remember and began casting my work into bronze when I was seventeen. Three decades later, I am still doing it – and I intend to never stop.”

       “As much as I try to avoid labelling myself, I am a figurative artist in everything I do. The figure to me is the perfect vehicle to communicate the human condition. My definition of success is to be a visionary through truthful and courageous artwork, work that communicates what it feels like to be alive in the world today.I keep moving my work forward by questioning, observing, looking for truth and searching for clarity. My goal is to have the courage to create what feels real, not necessarily beautiful, in order to create lasting, fine art.”

Paige Bradley

published in : paigebradley.com

Paige Bradley – Sculptures in Bronze

      Paige Bradley is an American sculpture artist who gained fame for her figurative bronze works that were internally illuminated with electricity. Titled “Expansion”, the bronze sculpture depicted a woman sitting in a cross-legged position with light streaming from cracks in her body. This piece was originally photographed in 2004 against New York’s skyline, gaining international fame and putting Paige on the map.

Ibrahim Mahama

Ibrahim Mahama

    Ibrahim Mahama is a Ghanian artist. He often works with found objects, transforming them in his practice and giving them new meaning. Mahama is best known for his practice of draping buildings in old jute sacks, which he stitches together with a team of collaborators to create patchwork quilts. Of the practice, Mahama says, “I used jute sacks because for me the history of crisis and failure is absorbed into the material. Their history speaks of how global transactions and capitalist structures work. And because how their humbleness contrasts with the monumentality of the buildings they cover.” He grew up in a polygamous family, and once noted that his collaborative nature could be a result of this unique environment.

Born in Tamale, Ghana in 1987, Mahama received his MFA in Painting and Sculpture from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, in Kumasi, Ghana in 2013. He lives and works in Tamale. Mahama was the youngest artist featured in the first Ghana Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, where he created a bunker-like space made out of the mesh used to smoke fish and filled it with references to Ghana’s history. Mahama has had multiple solo installations in Accra and Kumasi, as well as solo exhibitions in Dublin, Michigan, and at White Cube in London.

is an artist run project space, exhibition and research hub, cultural repository and artists’ residency. SCCA Tamale is an initiative of world-renowned Ghanaian artist, Ibrahim Mahama, as a contribution towards transforming the contemporary art scene in Ghana. The SCCA-Tamale team intends, with its diverse programming and research interests, to spotlight significant moments in Ghanaian and international art in a communal space. Affiliated to blaxTARLINES KUMASI, the Centre is operated by committed, dedicated and generous persons who produce critical discourse that will eventually be disseminated through exhibitions, publications and allied activities. SCCA-Tamale is dedicated to art and cultural practices which emerged in the 20th Century and inspire generations of artists and thinkers of the 21st Century and beyond.

published in : artnet.com

Ibrahim Mahama

 “I used jute sacks because for me the history of crisis and failure is absorbed into the material. Their history speaks of how global transactions and capitalist structures work. And because how their humbleness contrasts with the monumentality of the buildings they cover.”