Interview about Kepler 186f Messaging Chair, winner of the A' Fine Arts and Art Installation Design Award 2019
Structural basis of Kepler-186f arm-chair is a griddle, soldered from a steel wire to which the elements carved from the oak are fastened with the help of brass sleeves. Various options of armature use combine in harmony with wooden carving and jewelers elements. This art-object represents an experiment in which different aesthetic principles are combined. It could be described as "Barbaric or New Baroque" in which the rough and the exquisite forms are combined. As a result of improvisation, the Kepler became multilayered, enveloped with the subtexts and new details.
View detailed images, specifications, and award details on A' Design Award & Competition website.
View Design DetailsThe idea for the Kepler chair came about while I was creating a steel wire frame for a sculpture model. However, twisted wire is a rather rough material for the parts of a chair that come into contact with the body. These parts could be made from polished tubes or bent sheet metal, which would add a brutal and industrial aesthetic to the entire piece. But I find the collision of opposites more intriguing. Moreover, I’m an amateur when it comes to working with metal—my professional expertise lies in woodworking.I also considered other options for the armrests, similar to the backrest and seat—made of fabric on a solid base or entirely wooden but deliberately coarse, like the wire structure itself.The desire to enhance the effect of contrast and introduce a more refined aesthetic into the piece ultimately outweighed both the industrial concept and a unified primitive style.
I think this inspiration came from ancient and medieval art, objects from the Oseberg ship, and the church at Urnes. When a functional element, seemingly rough-hewn with an axe from a tree trunk, unexpectedly ends in refined, delicate carving.
The freeform shape of the chair’s legs became a natural continuation of its already woven frame. If the legs were made separately, they would most likely be uniform and lack the wooden detailing. From some angles, they might appear awkward, but they give the chair a certain "animalistic" dynamism. As one acquaintance put it, "It feels like this chair is about to start walking on its own."
When I began working on the chair, I underestimated the strength of the chosen technique and its structural flexibility. If I had known this in advance, I could have reduced the amount of wire to the bare minimum needed for the chair to support the weight of a human body. But things turned out differently.At first, I thought it was crucial to prevent the front part of the chair's backrest from bending when someone leaned against it. Over time, it became clear that the emerging structure had a very rigid framework. Had I removed some of the wire from the backrest, I could have easily maintained its rigidity by simply adding a through connection closer to the middle of the backrest. Aesthetically, this could have been an even more interesting solution. For example, there could have been openings in the place of two rectangular cutouts left in the soft padding of the backrest. If these through openings extended into the wire frame, revealing the thickness of the entire backrest instead of wire mesh, it would add depth to the perception of the fabric-covered design. I only recognized this possibility at the end of the work and decided not to change anything by then.It’s hard to convey, without visual aids, the beauty or strength of certain nodes that are best seen in photographs taken during the chair's construction. For the stretchers (upper frame supports), I used a closed volume made of loops of varying heights oriented in opposite directions. This resembled a fish body with diamond-shaped scale-like cells. At the same time, it was both a visually appealing and structurally reliable approach.This wire technique is characterized by unity and freedom, unlike the woodworking methods I am familiar with. A reliable woodworking joint requires reinforcement through tenons, dowels, clamps, and consideration of wood grain direction. In contrast, the woven part of the chair is a single wire fabric, just tightly twisted in certain places. Any additional through connection within the wire fabric adds strength to the structure. Moreover, we are free to create such a connection almost anywhere within the given volume, without exceeding its boundaries.
Honestly, all the plant-like, anthropomorphic, and zoomorphic imagery in the design of the chair was not initially planned. These were interpretations discovered by the first viewers who saw the chair during its creation. The distinctly zoomorphic features that influenced the chair's name emerged through improvisation with the legs, which began to resemble the limbs of a walking hoofed animal. This added a sense of liveliness and vitality to Kepler-186f.That said, one anthropomorphic detail was embedded in the rear leg of the chair. Like a "thing within a thing," it exists as its own distinct element, akin to a figurine placed inside a cabinet. Another human-like detail only remains in photographs taken during the creation process and has completely disappeared in the finished piece.The uncharted path of improvisation always reveals an unexpected network of branches, trails, and parallel roads—often even more enigmatic and unpredictable than what seemed visible at the outset. Creative energy, which sparks new ideas, permeates the process of creating a new piece, much like radiation in a radioactive element, present until its decay (completion of the work). It is during this process that the brightest and most surprising flashes occur—winds that scatter the seeds of new ideas. When working on an intriguing concept, one must always remember that it exists amidst a "pile" of similar ideas. At that moment, you are so focused on extracting this particular idea that you barely notice the multitude of others accompanying it. If these accompanying ideas remain unrecorded during the process of "extraction," you will most likely lose them forever—when the endless array of possibilities suddenly condenses into the final, compact form of the finished product.Most of the chair’s shapes are non-representational and abstract. I believe that abstraction, in most cases, is merely a type of ornament—ornament without narrative, characters, plant fragments, or the like. This explains its almost instant spread in 20th-century design.The lack of explicit specifics in abstract forms generates entirely different associations among viewers of the chair. Some see an elephant in the backrest, while others see a fish. Some may perceive it as drying fishing nets entangled with autumn leaves. For this reason, it’s better not to tie these forms directly to the idea of Kepler-186f.
In the end, I have much to reflect on and discuss. My creative experience has expanded. Had I, for practical reasons, suppressed my inspiration and, as Vladimir Mayakovsky once vividly put it, "stepped on the throat of my own song," I would have risked emptying my inner world.
Perhaps human creativity itself, in some ways diverging from earthly nature, is evidence of the existence of other worlds. This inner cosmos within a person reveals itself through the creation of new objects and works of art. Such is one of the ideas behind the Kepler-186f chair.The chair also contains a hidden argument against an early 20th-century notion that anything not made for an audience cannot be considered art. Yet it is evident that we have numerous ancient ritual and funerary masterpieces that were clearly not created for exhibition spaces. In challenging this idea, I symbolically concealed a human figurine within the chair.
Voyager is a symbol of flight into the uncharted depths of the creative cosmos. It represents an attempt to show how an artist’s inspiration can bring extraordinary objects and works of art into existence from a single small sketch.The idea for the chair emerged during the process of translating the graphics of one of my sketches into a three-dimensional structure, carrying many of its features and details. It arose from the cosmos of that drawing, just as distant objects first emerged from the darkness of space in Voyager’s photographs.The concept of naming and presenting the chair Kepler-186f as an object from real space came later, in the final stages. However, I must admit that the original sketch was inspired by a photograph of a spiral galaxy taken by the Hubble telescope. The reflection of that spiral is present in several details of the chair. Additionally, the wire fabric with its wormhole-like openings is essentially an analog to the visual models of gravitational fields in astrophysics.
After receiving the award for the chair, I created a wire bench in a simplified version of the Kepler-186f technique. As a result, I accumulated detailed groundwork for innovative furniture designs. However, due to current circumstances, I am working alone to complete another extremely complex project and currently have no opportunity to continue creative experiments with furniture.
Everything happened in reverse order. Initially, I was finishing the chair’s legs while it was upside down. As the legs began to take their final shape, they unexpectedly started to resemble four columns with asymmetrical capitals.
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