Wieki Frozen in time

"FROZEN IN TIME" Flowering sprigs seem to merge with a lamp, the construction of stools is hiding within a transparent skin and branches bow under the weight of icy layers, seemingly for a few moments only. The objects look like frozen moments in time. They are wellknown in their functionality – lamps, stools, vases – but mysterious in their connections of contrasting elements and their silent appearance. Inspiration The inspiration for the project was taken from the photographs of a natural phenomenon that struck the North East of the Netherlands on March 2nd 1987, when twenty to thirty millimetres of icy rain poured down from the sky. The glazed frost brought public life to a complete standstill and produced a layer of ice on everything it landed on, branches of trees, lampposts, clotheslines from which drops of ice were drooping. The half-transparent ice connected things in a matter-of-fact and extremely poetic way. For one day the sidewalk, bicycles and trees merged into one, while cars seemed to stick to the streets for ever. Only one day. When the ice started to melt down trees could continue to grow their blossoms and cars could persue their tours. What struck us at first was the formal, visual beauty. Wellknown forms, hiding beneath a transparent skin, had gained a melancholy glow. But there was more. On a deeper level the items seemed to have turned into tales from another, yet familiar world. Through the metamorphosis, caused by nature, the strangely familiar items seemed to communicate something which had always been there and was only waiting to be unveiled. Paradoxically the cover of ice caused a dis-covering. This very tension between down to earth familiarity and meanings hiding underneath the skin of products is a theme which surfaces in almost all the designs of Studio Wieki Somers, for instance in High Tea Pot, Bathboat and the Merry-go-round Coat rack designed for Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Rotterdam. Also the way to produce the subtle merging of functionality and poetry – for instance by freezing a process or by connecting things through an extra layer - can be seen in works like Blossoms, Mattrass Stone Bottle and Departed Glory. Wieki Somers: “I have always been interested in the character and possibilities of materials, in which I believe stories are hiding that can be liberated, much in the tradition of what the classical sculptors claimed to do. Wasn’t it Michelangelo who said the figures were waiting in the marble to be released by the artist? Comparable to that idea I was always convinced that materials and techniques have an inner meaning.”