Ibiyane is a Caribbean-based design studio carving a unique approach to furniture-making

Origin stories hold a lot of clues to a designer’s beliefs and consequent trajectory, and Ibiyane’s is no different. ‘We started in 2020, during lockdown,’ explains Tania Doumbe Fines, who co-founded the studio with Élodie Dérond. 

‘I basically had a notebook with things I wanted to do in my life, a bucket list I guess. And with my background in interior design, I wanted to make a chair. So I started designing an African birthing chair, and from that, a friend of ours invited us to make a seat for an exhibition. Élodie started helping me and we just love the process of working together and bringing our ideas from our minds into actual objects crafted with our hands.’ 

Ibiyane’s sculptural designs

While others across the globe allowed the pandemic and its attendant season of uncertainty to lead them to stasis, for Doumbe Fines and Dérond, it sharpened focus and galvanised a spirit of co-creation, at first in Montreal, and now in Martinique, near Dérond’s childhood home. Ibiyane was, and indeed still is, a studio that seeks to explore the stories we tell with the objects we make, and to incite deeper discourses between maker and collector.

The name for the brand is an homage to Doumbe Fines’ Cameroonian heritage: ‘Ibiyane means to know one another in the Batonga language. For us, the project is about being in conversation and exchanging ideas, views on the world, on beauty and on design. And we are moved and inspired by bringing our interpretations, our vision, our philosophy to the design world – whether it is how we approach making a chair, a mirror or any type of furniture.’ 

Buttressing the notion of objects as a conduit of knowledge exchange and deeper understanding is the Elombe series, which was shown to critical acclaim at Milan Design Week 2023. Doumbe Fines explains: ‘Elombe means conversation. We see it as a practice on growing conversation, so each piece is a new conversation, which is why it is a numbered series.’

Living in Martinique has further distilled the studio’s methodology and allowed space for further articulation of design language with pieces made of Caribbean pine and other timber native to the island, and other techniques beyond the stack laminated one. 

‘Our design language is definitely evolving. We are still experimenting and working mostly with curves and organic forms. We see our pieces as functional but practical, and we like simplicity. We want to work with local resources, and we are trying to see how we can make it work where we only work with Martinican wood,’ notes Dérond.

Working with nature is something that they have taken to documenting on Instagram, where seemingly innocuous blocks of wood are seen carved into the extraordinary. ‘Just walking on the beach, for instance, we were able to find a piece of wood and it felt like it had something to tell us, and it informed the way we sculpted it afterwards,’ says Dérond. ‘That was a nice training of some sort, letting the wood tell us where we could go with it.’

It is rare that a pair of autodidact designers have their inaugural work shown at a Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s ‘The New Guard: Stories from the New World’ exhibition, as Ibiyane’s was, and continue to build on a momentum that has them billed as the new darlings of design, but Doumbe Fines and Dérond remain resolutely unaffected by the accolades and excitement around their work. 

‘It is kind of far from us, distant, maybe because I am not from the design world by training,’ notes Dérond. This ‘outsider-would-be-insider’ status works to their advantage. ‘I feel like it keeps us with a childlike approach to design. By going to the fairs and feeling outside of this world, it makes us more intuitive.’

For Doumbe Fines, the early successes have merely widened the possibilities. ‘When we started, we were taking an African essence but thinking “How can it be modern?” And when we read more about African art, sculpture and design and why the African community creates, we got a lot from that. It is what we want to bring to our work: the philosophy and the intention in creation.’ A vision that is equally audacious and lifelong in its scope of ambition feels like the perfect progression for a studio that has already left its mark on the design landscape.  

Ibiyane's work is part of an upcoming exhibition at Jessica Silverman Gallery. Titled 'Enthroned', it features the work of ten female-led design practices and is on view from 11 January to 2 March 2024, 621 Grant Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94108.

@ibiyane

A version of this article appears in the January 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today