 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Julia Lohmann (born 1977, Germany) is a multidisciplinary designer, educator and researcher living and working in Helsinki, Finland. She is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Design at Aalto University. [1]
Born in Hildesheim, Germany, Julia Lohmann came to the United Kingdom in 1998 to study on the BA (Hons) Graphic Design course at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design, University College (now the University for the Creative Arts). She graduated in 2001 and won several prizes for her graphic design and product development work. She subsequently completed a two-year MA in Design Products at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London in 2004. In 2018, Lohmann completed her PhD 'The Department of Seaweed – Co-speculative Design in a Museum Residency', supervised collaboratively by the RCA and Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), London, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. [2]
Upon graduation, Julia Lohmann set up her own design studio in London in 2004. [3] Her work was selected for the ‘Design Mart’ exhibition at the Design Museum, London, by then director Alice Rawsthorn. Since then, Lohmann's work has been shown as part of the ‘Great Brits’ touring exhibition organised by the British Council and numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums in the UK and abroad, as well as The Culture Show (BBC, 2007), in books, international magazines and newspapers.
As designer in residence at the V&A during her PhD studentship in 2013, Julia Lohmann founded the 'Department of Seaweed' [4] , a trans-disciplinary Community of Practice exploring seaweed as a sustainable material for making.
From 2011 to 2018, Julia Lohmann taught as Professor for Foundations in Artistic Practices (Design) at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK). In 2018, she was appointed Professor of Practice in Contemporary Design at Aalto University, Espoo, Finland, where in 2023, she became a tenured Associate Professor of Contemporary Design.
Lohmann thinks that the design industry truly has power and it should not support the status quo, instead moving forward in a socially responsible and sustainable way. She is constantly asking herself questions and design is her way of figuring out how she views the world.
Some of her design focuses on animals and dead animals; concentrating on the moment when humans mentally remove themselves from an animal's death. Her goal is to break the mental gap that people have when considering what's on their plate and how it got there. Therefore, she has focused on the nastier features of the production of food in some of her work. Some examples are a ceiling made from the stomach of sheep, a gutted carcass cast in resin, vessels made from animal bones, and porcelain jewellery made by casting frozen baby mice. Her work includes a couch shaped as a headless cow, made to illustrate the use of a number of hides in making a typical couch, so that the creased parts of the cow do not show. [5] Whether her starting point is leather or seaweed, Lohmann's interest lies in finding capabilities in materials that no one else has. She says she finds it way more challenging if a material starts as something ‘typically’ beautiful. [6]
The 'Hidaka Ohmu' seaweed pavilion was commissioned for the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum exhibition 'Partnering with Nature' at the 50th World Economic Forum in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland. [7] The pavilion was designed as a space for discussions about climate change, ocean health, ocean literacy [8] and ocean protection, as well as the role of design and biomaterials in addressing these issues.
The 'Oki Naganode' is a large-scale sculpture made of Japanese Naga seaweed, treated to remain flexible and leather-like in appearance, changing colour from dark green to translucent beige as the chlorophyll in the seaweed degrades. The seaweed is stretched over a modular framework made of rattan and aluminium. The sculpture is intended to showcase the material qualities of seaweed. It has been acquired by MoMA [9] and inspired the novelist Rob Magnuson Smith to write an imagined secret history of the work. [10]
A window installation at the Wellcome Trust headquarters in London, inspired by the microorganisms that inhabit human bodies and presents humans as multi-species ecosystems. It consists of two representations of reclining human figures, made of 9000 Petri dishes mounted on back-lit acrylic panels. The petri dishes contain images of bacteria colonies that are positioned within the artwork based on the parts of the human body in which they most commonly live. Viewed from afar, the installation looks like pixellated images of humans, whereas viewed close-up, the Petri dishes and the microbe images they contain come to the fore. [11]
This project is based on the idea that dried strips of seaweed could replace typical materiality in the creation of everyday objects. This is shown in the laser-cut lampshades. They were cut and then stretched or sewed into new shapes while still wet. Lohmann thinks that seaweed is an undervalued material, and that we consume it in things like toothpaste everyday without realizing it. It could potentially be a substitute for materials such as leather and parchment, among others. She also wants to promote seaweed's use in communities that could combine the material with their local artisanship. For example, the use of kelp on fish farms as water filters could provide extra income for struggling fishing communities. [12]
This project was in reaction to research into man-made constructions that are conquered by nature and destroyed by humans; it's based on the effects of natural disasters on built structures. The series is a reversal of what qualities are normally associated with certain man-made and natural materials. The concrete is cast onto a wool backing and subsequently broken up. This design process harnesses the effects of deterioration and the wool holds the concrete together. The resulting series is a range of unique pieces based on a single mold. [13]
The Catch shows how much the ocean has been depleted by over-fishing and vast consumption of marine life. Those visiting this installation are confronted with towering waves created from empty fish boxes. The visitor is led into the core, a room also made from fishing boxes and lighted by candles held in tuna vertebrae. This piece challenges the way many assume there is a limitless supply of marine life, and the lack of action as a response of scientific research. [14]
This cast is based on the internal cavity of a calf. The reasoning was that when an animal is slaughtered, the internal organs are removed and a purposeless negative space is left. It only exists for the short period in time between when the animal becomes seen as meat. [15] The work has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [16]
Dorothy Cross is an Irish artist. Working with differing media, including sculpture, photography, video and installation, she represented Ireland at the 1993 Venice Biennale. Central to her work as a whole are themes of sexual and cultural identity, personal history, memory, and the gaps between the conscious and subconscious. In a 2009 speech by the president of UCC, Cross was described as "one of Ireland’s leading artists".
Helen Chadwick was a British sculptor, photographer and installation artist. In 1987, she became one of the first women artists to be nominated for the Turner Prize. Chadwick was known for "challenging stereotypical perceptions of the body in elegant yet unconventional forms. Her work draws from a range of sources, from myths to science, grappling with a plethora of unconventional, visceral materials that included chocolate, lambs tongues and rotting vegetable matter. Her skilled use of traditional fabrication methods and sophisticated technologies transform these unusual materials into complex installations. Maureen Paley noted that "Helen was always talking about craftsmanship—a constant fount of information". Binary oppositions was a strong theme in Chadwick's work; seductive/repulsive, male/female, organic/man-made. Her combinations "emphasise yet simultaneously dissolve the contrasts between them". Her gender representations forge a sense of ambiguity and a disquieting sexuality blurring the boundaries of ourselves as singular and stable beings."
Aino Maria Marsio-Aalto was a Finnish architect and a pioneer of Scandinavian design. She is known as a co-founder of the design company Artek and as a collaborator on its most well-known designs. As Artek's first artistic director, her creative output spanned textiles, lamps, glassware, and buildings. It has been discovered that it was Aino who completed the first work commissioned through Artek which was the Viipuri Library in 1935. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and MoMA has included her work in nine exhibitions. Aino Aalto’s first exhibition was Art in Progress: 15th Anniversary Exhibitions: Design for Use at MoMA in 1944. Other major exhibitions were at the Barbican Art Gallery in London and Chelsea Space in London. Aino Aalto has been exhibited with Pablo Picasso.
Tara Donovan is an American sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her large-scale installations, sculptures, drawings, and prints utilize everyday objects to explore the transformative effects of accumulation and aggregation. Known for her commitment to process, she has earned acclaim for her ability to exploit the inherent physical characteristics of an object in order to transform it into works that generate unique perceptual phenomena and atmospheric effects. Her work has been conceptually linked to an art historical lineage that includes Postminimalism and Process artists such as Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, Richard Serra, and Robert Morris, along with Light and Space artists such as Mary Corse, Helen Pashgian, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell.
Ann Hamilton is an American visual artist who emerged in the early 1980s known for her large-scale multimedia installations. After receiving her BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979, she lived in Banff, Alberta, and Montreal, Quebec, Canada before deciding to pursue an MFA in sculpture at Yale in 1983. From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Since 2001, Hamilton has served on the faculty of the Department of Art at the Ohio State University. She was appointed a Distinguished University Professor in 2011.
Doris Salcedo is a Colombian-born visual artist and sculptor. Her work is influenced by her experiences of life in Colombia and is generally composed of commonplace items such as wooden furniture, clothing, concrete, grass, and rose petals. Salcedo's work gives form to pain, trauma, and loss, while creating space for individual and collective mourning. These themes stem from her own personal history. Members of her own family were among the many people who have disappeared in politically troubled Colombia. Much of her work deals with the fact that, while the death of a loved one can be mourned, their disappearance leaves an unbearable emptiness. Salcedo lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia.
Bharti Kher is a contemporary artist. In a career spanning nearly three decades, she has worked across painting, sculpture and installation. Throughout her practice she has displayed an unwavering relationship with the body, its narratives, and the nature of things. Inspired by a wide range of sources and making practices, she employs the readymade in wide arc of meaning and transformation. Kher's works thus appear to move through time, using reference as a counterpoint and contradiction as a visual tool.
Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of fiber art to other media. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Naihan Li is a Chinese designer architect. She currently lives and works in Beijing in the Caochangdi Art District.
Sigalit Landau is an Israeli sculptor, video and installation artist.
Victimless Leather (2004) is an art piece that represents a leather jacket without killing any animals. It is a prototype of a stitch-less jacket, grown from cell cultures into a layer of tissue supported by a coat shaped polymer layer. "Victimless Leather" was created created as a sub-project of the Tissue Culture & Art Project, from the University of Western Australia and showcased at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artwork, a miniature jacket made from living mouse stem cells in an incubator, was designed to challenge perceptions of life and human responsibility toward manipulated living systems. This artistic grown garment is intended to confront people with the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for protective and aesthetic reasons and confronts notions of relationships with manipulated living systems. However, due to rapid cell growth, the exhibit was eventually "killed" by cutting off its nutrients, aligning with the creators' intent to remind viewers of the responsibility towards manipulated life.
Liz Larner is an American installation artist and sculptor living and working in Los Angeles.
Hella Jongerius is a Dutch industrial designer.
Sheela Gowda is a contemporary artist living and working in Bangalore. Gowda studied painting at Ken School of Art, Bangalore, India (1979) pursued a postgraduate diploma at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India (1982), and a MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in London in 1986. Trained as a painter Gowda expanded her practice into sculpture and installation employing a diversity of material like human hair, cow-dung, incense and kumkuma powder. She is known for her 'process-orientated' work, often inspired by the everyday labor experiences of marginalized people in India. Her work is associated with postminimalism drawing from ritualistic associations. Her early oils with pensive girls in nature were influenced by her mentor K. G. Subramanyan, and later ones by Nalini Malani towards a somewhat expressionistic direction depicting a middle class chaos and tensions underplayed by coarse eroticism. She is the recipient of the 2019 Maria Lassnig Prize.
Marguerite Humeau is a French visual artist. She lives in London.
Suzanne Anker is an American visual artist and theorist. Considered a pioneer in Bio Art., she has been working on the relationship of art and the biological sciences for more than twenty five years. Her practice investigates the ways in which nature is being altered in the 21st century. Concerned with genetics, climate change, species extinction and toxic degradation, her work calls attention to the beauty of life and the "necessity for enlightened thinking about nature's 'tangled bank'." Anker frequently assembles with "pre-defined and found materials" botanical specimens, medical museum artifacts, laboratory apparatus, microscopic images and geological specimens.
Liz Collins is an American contemporary artist and designer. Collins is recognized for her artwork involving fabric, knitwear, and textiles as well as the fashion label she developed. She has expertise in textile media including the transition of fabric into multi-dimensional forms as a method to vary the scale of her pieces to make them architectural and inviting rather than object-based. Collins is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Julia deVille is a New Zealand-born artist, jeweller and taxidermist, who only uses subjects in her taxidermy that have died of natural causes. She lives and works in Australia.
Vegan design is the use of vegan products in such contexts as interior design, fashion design, household goods and the arts. Such products are also known as "humane" or "cruelty-free" and "[do] not originate from any living creature, [are] not an animal byproduct and [are] not tested on animals".
Liz Young was a Los Angeles-based artist known for diverse work investigating body- and nature-focused themes, such as loss, beauty, the inevitability of decay, and the fragility of life. She produced sculpture, installation, performance, painting, drawing and video incorporating fabricated and recontextualized found objects, organic materials, and processes from industrial metalworking to handicrafts, taxidermy and traditional art practices. Young exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, including solo shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and alternative spaces such as Hallwalls, Randolph Street Gallery (Chicago) and New Langton Arts ; she participated in group shows at Exit Art, Art in the Anchorage, and Armory Center for the Arts, among others. Her art was discussed in ARTnews, Artforum, Frieze, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Village Voice, and is included in the LACMA permanent collection. Critic Peter Frank wrote that her work "reflects both on life's relentless erosion of body and spirit, and on our indomitable struggle against these nagging cruelties." Artillery Magazine critic Ezrha Jean Black called her 2017 installation a "mordant yet elegiac show" in which "craft bears out the work’s consciousness." In 2016, Young received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; she was recognized with awards from the Getty Trust and Andy Warhol Foundation, among others. Young lived and worked in Los Angeles from 1981.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
