Stephen Burks Creates an Intricate "Ceremonial Site" From Wood

Summary

• Stephen Burks Man Made has teamed up with Alpi to create an installation named “The Lost Cloth Object”
• The piece is currently on show at Design Miami, and features wooden patterns based on textiles from the ancient Kuba kingdom

Italian material company Alpi has teamed up with Stephen Burks Man Made to create an installation inspired by the art and ceremonies from the ancient Kuba kingdom.

On view at this year’s Design Miami fair, “The Lost Cloth Object” installation is made up of four key components, each crafted from Alpi’s wood veneer.

Using the material, Burks developed a wooden pattern inspired by Kuba textile, and alongside Alpi’s craftspeople, transformed the solid surface into something that evokes the movement of fabric. Across each piece of the installation, sections are expertly matched. Despite describing it as a challenge, Alpi president Vittorio Alpi says it’s these projects which help bring the material that his family has produced for three generations to life.

“When Stephen proposed The Lost Cloth Object, it felt like a moment of magical creativity,” he said. “It represents a consideration of design as a cultural practice, and its visual language interprets the material and reinvents it to tell a new story.”

Stephen Burks And Malika Leiper

Burks, who founded Stephen Burks Man Made back in 2003 and now works alongside Malika Leiper, was inspired to create this particular pattern following a trip to Kinshasa, and to learn firsthand from the Kuba arts practitioners.

“We’re not interested in mimicking the beautiful, prestigious cloths that exist in museums all over the world,” he said. “On the contrary, we’re interested in a hybrid project that creates space for new expressions of Kuba in new materials in collaboration with industry like Alpi, to extend the Kuba arts traditions into the future.”

With this motivation in mind, Burks set about devising the installation itself, which he describes as “ceremonial site”. While he prefers not to formally dictate the use of each piece in the vignette – “this is not a finite product, it’s a questioning of design and material practice” – the is built upon a platform and features what you could describe as a rocking stool, a rocking ottoman, and a curved partition.

In addition to the inspiration Burks found in the Kuba textiles, he felt drawn to Alpi’s history working alongside some of Italy’s most revered designers, such as Alessandro Mendini and Ettore Sottsass.

“It was powerful for us, to make that connection that joins African cultural movements to Italian cultural movements,” he said.

The Lost Cloth Object is on view at Design Miami until December 7, as part of a small group show curated by Glenn Adamson.