TILE AFTER TIME
» 2010 July
Summer comes, summer goes
• • • • • But summer comes for everyone. The week before, we decided to dismantle our old kiln. It has served us well, and if it weren’t for the old two, I daresay we would not be where we are now! We did plenty of mosaic pieces when we first ventured into furniture—in fact it was our fired-tile inlaid tables that served as our forward army—and have gone through interesting times with it.
The end of the day, is as golden as its era: The call for new beginnings.
Because I believe that designers reflect themselves through the medium they work with, moving on from mosaic pieces was a very significant time for me and Gus, and heralded a change in my personal aesthetics as well. The factory before had tiles of all sorts. There were scrapbooks full of tile samples, tiles stored where we could apply them to a different model.
We were practically eating kiln-fired tiles for breakfast!
Even if it was such an honestly lucrative endeavour (the tropical/ Mediterranean look was the vogue at that time), sometimes you know when it’s time to move on. When it’s time to walk into another living room.
I tend to ask myself the same questions twice, and answer them twice: no, says the brain, yes says the heart.
The privilege of thinking with your gut sometimes, is that it defies logic. And just as it defies logical progression, like tiles, everything will slowly fall into place. In the end, it is a grand mosaic of yet another lesson in life, completed.
• • • • • I am a firm believer of changes. I think changes are what move things. In sailing lingo, hitting the doldrums is one of the worst things a mariner could hope for. That means there is no wind to move the sails; with no wind, the ship is stuck in its position until it can move again. In a way one could say that I felt like a change had to be undergone.
In poetry, repetition is change.
We still get enquiries from clients of the past, wondering if we plan to revive our terracotta products. We were very glad that they had been important to many people in so many ways, but we have to tell them it’s time to move on, find new beginnings.
What better way to kickstart beginnings than with endings?
• • • • • Back when I worked double desk jobs, I was not satisfied with not being able to express the right side of my brain at all, which was why I set up a part-time dress shop. With a few machines and skilled hands who came to the house to work on my designs, and friends who would commission me to do a wedding dress, cocktail frock or a sassy blouse, I managed to keep things running. When my sister had her child, I’d make dresses for the tyke from the excess cloth of my projects, which were too small to make into wearable adult’s clothing, and too big to be thrown away!
Of course choosing to go all-out on a furniture business changes things, and my little dress shop had to go. But little would I know how I would continue to dress up—furniture this time!
White Meryll is dainty and debonaire and likes her wine red.
Grey Meryll loves tapas at her house with close friends, and has a vast assortment of exotic teas!
Creating the Meryll was such a de ja vu for me. There is actually very little difference between dressing up a person and dressing up a piece of furniture. Both have silhouettes that are flattering and flat; both need the right colours to make them stand out whilst blending in.
Three sisters stealing the show!
Colour is such an important thing! A lady must be subtly arresting but always elegant. Extending the metaphor further, that is what interior designing and interior decorating is like too; one dresses up a space. With lights, with shadow, with colour and texture, with actions that you imagine will take place.
Black Meryll is the silent intellectual who’s always out partying on Saturday night.
That’s what I always remind myself when I design; a chair is not alone. It will be with other pieces of furniture as well, and though one may regard what we do ‘creative’, I believe that design and art answer the same question in a different way. This chair will have to compliment a table, it must be comfortable, it must be capable of being sat on.
That is why, despite being able to marry them once in a while (art and design), ultimately a product or a piece should answer to one or the other.
It’s the skill of putting things together. Sometimes a single piece looks unremarkable by itself, but if it will ultimately be a part of a greater whole—then that one leaf-imprinted tile would make all the difference.
Photos by K Batiquin »
