A new collection from Brazilian designer Paola Vilas translates the modernist influences that epitomise her jewellery designs into playful and subversive homeware. Mischievous pieces take the female form as inspiration: wall nipples in brass sit alongside sculptural breast trays, with curving table and floor lamps cutting sensual silhouettes. Other pieces reinterpret the face into spiralling lines, making for contemporary candlesticks and faintly surprised-looking chairs.
‘I subverted and played with the way we perceive reality – not just in what we wear, but now on a human scale, indoors,’ Vilas tells us. ‘Bringing a dream world, where everything is possible to our most intimate environment. It's a surrealistic attitude to turn your home into a great female entity with our wall nipples, or to allow yourself to create a narrative around our “Henri” chairs, which watch curiously when positioned in front of a dining table. The attitude of rethinking our reality is the same as that of jewellery, but on a scale that communicates in another sphere.’
Vilas was keen to transport us out of the monotony of the everyday with pieces that distort the way we see our surroundings, blurring the lines between the imaginative and the functional in what felt like a natural extension to her work as a jewellery designer. ‘I decided to follow construction processes similar to those of jewellery in furniture, which creates a narrative around dimension and scale, something that has always been so characteristic in my work of creating small wearable sculptures,’ she says.
The materials she uses – brass, iron, Brazilian rocks – create the organic contrasts she favours in her jewels. ‘The processes are the same, only in a larger dimension and designed for distinct usability,’ she says. ‘What surprised me was how my construction process – never based on jewellery but on sculpture – flowed in a totally synergistic way to other scales.’
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