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1. How did the Salvor bags come about?
It was a happy accident…and inevitable.. Salvor is a graphic project which first began about 3 years ago in a basement studio below the sidewalk on Prince Street right off the Bowery. We printed all kinds of things from wall treatments to t-shirts to yukata to doll-like sculptures..... this was the first time i worked in 2D. Up until that time i had worked almost entirely in 3D (focusing on structure without regard to surface). In 1984 i was building cement and earth pre-fab houses for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. After i came back to New York i jumped into sculpture and made large pieces from found industrial materials...this led eventually to useful objects and a decade of designing furniture, lighting and interiors in the US, Japan and the UK. The bag project is a coming together of various disparate tendencies half explored over the years; a union of ideas that were ripe and begging to be merged into a single expression. From the perspective of the design task, bags are particularly satisfying to make as they are something like portable architecture. Little soft houses that come to life when filled and carried around. I think the strong pull we experience when we find the "right" bag is primal. Going back a few eons to our nomadic days our survival most likely depended on a good bag. The home you carried on your back.
2. What is going on with the Bebetan bag?
The Bebetan bag was based on a simple shoulder sack. In volume and in construction it is a bucket…actually a square bucket. This is a pretty ancient bag design i think.
The real idea was to create a soft malleable form that then "carries" the surface motifs (designs) that are printed onto the the velour-like Florentine suede. What I’m really looking for is to see how the patterns and images deform and re-construct themselves when the bag "falls" and takes different shapes depending on who is wearing it and what’s inside. It’s always different. This is more alive than say a graphic printed onto a table top that is completely static and proportionally frozen.
The next task on the Bebetan bag was to come up with a simple shoulder strap that could adjust easily and w/o the use of any metal parts. i looked around at so many hardware choices on the market (hooks, snaps, sliders, buckles, grommets, d-rings, clips,etc...). They were mostly uninteresting and also added too much "bling" for this bag. To adjust the strap length w/o metal parts in a simple way seemed almost impossible so it took awhile to figure out. Finally i came upon the idea to make the "locking tab" part, that is attached to the bag body, out of leather itself. Also the strap would have holes laser cut in a precise shape to match the shape of the tab. In this way the tab is like a shirt button and the holes in the strap are the button-holes. As the buttons are obviously stronger than the shirt cloth so the tab here is stiffer than the strap leather. The key here is that for this to work correctly we had to find very stiff and strong leather, especially for the tab. The best leather for this type of thing is "bridle leather". This is vegetable tanned leather made for use in harness and horse saddles and reins,etc.. so it must be incredibly strong. We found this amazing bridle leather from one of the oldest working tanneries in the States- Hermann Oak Leather in St. Louis, Missouri. They have been tanning leather in the same spot since about 1860. They only use bark from oak trees to tan the hides and it takes approx. 60 days for each piece.
We are now working on the graphic motifs for the next collection as well as a bunch of smaller pouches and other shaped bags....
3. What inspired you to enter the field of design? In other words, why are you a designer?
I think it was a few coinciding (colliding?) factors…it kinda started simply with needing a piece of furniture or object and not being able to afford the one I liked….or not liking anything that was out there. It first started as a kid. We would build our own tents and go-karts and bikes. At that time we didn’t know we were designers but we were using fundamentally the same principles I follow now. I’ve always been as much a maker as designer. Making has been crucial for my process because I find being directly involved with the material is key to the end result. There’s always a few twists and turns and unintended consequences which are usually more interesting than your starting concept was. If you’re not there in this phase (ie: just handing over a concept to a factory) you may miss some of the greatest mistakes. This is just how reality works. Always a new wrinkle beyond what you can conceive. This is the number one motivator that keeps me going and interested. “What’s going to happen today?” I start the day with a few clues and intentions and just ride it along from there.
4. What are the predominate characteristics of your work? Is there a common theme?
Probably most of what I talked about in the above paragraph….in addition to this… Specifically…what I think I get most excited about in any work is when you hit this magic place halfway between man and nature. Sometimes I get lucky and the work has not feeling of human manipulation…but it’s not just raw simulated nature either…the magic quality is that which is both and neither and transcends both as well….hard to qualify in specifics. It’s just a feeling. I think this work is the good stuff. The stuff that is mysteriously alive and stays sharp and fresh timelessly.
5. Who or what are you inspired by?
So many. Bucky Fuller is one of the most inspiring. A designer whose “designs” were beautiful because of the raw elegance of their structure and function. Also Joseph Beuys for his out of left field DIY aesthetic which had never been seen before or quite the same since. In the design pantheon I love especially the work of Enzo Mari (his 1x2 project) and almost anything Bruno Munari created. He’s especially an inspiration because he was not limited to one media or genre. At this point I’m most interested in mixing it all up the way he and Sori Yanagi have done. You can create on a massive scale on Monday building a bridge or stadium and on Tuesday design a postcard or a t-shirt or a kid’s toy or a video piece. This is the kind of stuff I’m having fun with now…a mix of stable solid mediums and fluid ineffable ones…(I can tell you more about the other projects if you would like to know more about any of the other recent projects in NY and Tokyo)…