East Indian Walnut wood, Burmese Teak Wood, charcoal finish, steel spring, firestick, bio slime, woven hemp and fiber, brass frame and handles
Multi-piece furniture with components rooted in the five elements of earth, water, air, fire, and space.
Hand-embroidered fabric screen, copper coils, organza, beads
Woven on textile, the ephemerality of an afterimage is transformed into material – a multisensory fabric screen that depicts both domestic and urban space, tying the organic body to the concrete city.
Padauk wood, fabric padding, shells
A restful piece inspired by the practice of ascetics who sought to achieve enlightenment through meditation.
There’s a nondescript building in Chinatown that houses multiple artist studios, its entrance a slim door frame and a short hall that leads to a creaky elevator. Upstairs, hallways are drably lit by fluorescent lights. It’s only when you get behind the doors that things get interesting–rooms awash in sunlight beaming in through large windows, ceilings high, walls covered with scribbled notes and research clips, spaces and corners with fascinating works-in-progress, not-yet-started works, never-to-be-finished works and all permutations in-between. This is what I saw when I entered Swati’s studio.
Swati Jain, who runs the artistic practice unown space, shows me Table On A Walk, a conceptual furniture piece that ties the body to the environment through the five elements of earth, water, fire, air, and space. From the outset, one can tell that Table On A Walk isn’t a typical piece of furniture. One of legs, for example, is shaped like an actual limb, and at the bottom, a human foot carved out of wood, modeled after the artist’s own. As Swati explains the features of the table, it becomes clear that every corner, every element of it was made with intention, not only in terms of design and function, but also in ethos and concept.
Table On A Walk is part of unown space’s Transcendental Phenomenology collection, what Swati calls a “multi-sensory performative furniture series”. In her artistic statement about the collection, she describes it as a series that “draws from reflections on urban landscapes to meditations on natural phenomena around us”. In her practice, Swati asks, “What does it mean to produce something? What is its impact on the environment?”. Her pieces blend design, art, spirituality, environmentalism, and utility, raising questions about the nature of our relationship with the objects around us. So what does “transcendental phenomenology” mean in practice, and more concretely, how can something seemingly simple, like piece of furniture, precipitate this?
Swati brings these concepts and questions to Collectible, a design fair that held its inaugural New York edition from September 4 to 8, 2024 at Water Street Projects. Following seven renowned editions in Brussels, Belgium, the fair ventured to the US in an attempt to carve out its own niche in New York City’s design scene. With four sections and four curated spaces, the fair presented pieces from design galleries, studios, designers, and more.
For me, Swati’s collection stood out as the only body of work that considered the environment beyond notions of sustainability, material, and climate impact. Rather, her work gets to the heart and the ethos of these matters. Specifically, how do we relate to nature in our everyday lives? How can the objects and products around us enable or disable our relationship with nature?
Let’s examine Table On A Walk and all its parts–there are removable desks within the desk: slabs of wood you can take off that function as portable work trays; a basket that can be used as a bag; a wooden suitcase that can be wheeled around the city; a chair on a spring that can also be used as a desk at the park. Built on one side, resembling a belt of firecrackers or colorful ammunition, are individual containers for incense. An incense stick can then go into a holder shaped like a phallus and can be unscrewed from the side of the table and mounted securely on top. The result is a multifaceted piece that’s playful and thoughtful. It marries creativity and productivity, too, allowing us to consider how thinking, working, experimenting are interconnected. So much of the piece also asks its users to engage with it more actively–removing, replacing, reattaching things, finding new ways to use and reuse the table–what Swati calls a type of “environmental embodiment”.
In another piece, Swati moves from work to rest. ChAir is a reclining chair made of fleshy red Padauk wood and decorated with pads that resemble the points along the spine and hips. The headrest holds two attachable shells that act as “anthropomorphic AirPods”, so one can listen to the sound of the waves while resting. ChAir references the spiritual practices of ascetics in the Sittanavasal Caves of Tamil Nadu, India, where they would sit on stone-carved beds as a way to “dismiss the body”, an act of complete surrender.
Meanwhile, the fabric tableaux Light and Body contains embroidered elements of urban and domestic life. Scenes from Times Square, for example, are juxtaposed with snippets of home interiors. It’s a tapestry of Swati’s own memories, as an artist who has lived in both Mumbai and New York City.
In her pieces, Swati calls to mind the notion of ritual, of the everyday performances that we conduct alongside and along with the objects around us. What happens when we learn to pay attention to these rituals, these small quotidian acts? I find this to be especially important for urbanites who live in environments of concrete and glass and whose daily routines are often stripped of interactions or collisions with natural phenomena or earthly elements. Surrounded by constant stimulation, city folk must sometimes numb themselves to the torrential charge of sights, smells, and sounds of everyday life. But the work of unown space wishes to shuffle this around and give us new encounters with the things around us. What if, when we sit at our desks, we first activate our sense of smell instead of sight, light an incense instead of staring straight into the screen? What if, despite our urban lives, our furniture can tangentially connect us to nature through sound? The Transcendental Phenomenology collection evokes these questions, and even bigger ones about objects and design. What would it mean to design objects that are made from nature and make us conscious of nature in turn?