Portrait/Interview:
Liliana Ovalle
Liliana Ovalle is a London-based product designer, originally from Mexico.
Since graduating from the Royal College of Art, Liliana has worked on her chosen themes
of the incomplete, the unrehearsed, in the field of conceptual design. By maintaining her own ideas and interests, her work has become internationally sought-after and collectable.
Liliana currently exhibits at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, part of Make Yourself Comfortable at Chatsworth, an exhibition with Thomas Heatherwick and Moritz Waldemeyer, running until October this year. She talks to Anna Stewart.
Liliana, I’m interested in your work because there’s always a lot more to your pieces than first meets the eye. One of your most intriguing projects is the red clay Sinkhole Vessels, which are now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Arts and Design in NY. Please can you explain this project in your own words?
In the past couple of years I have grown an interest in the phenomena of sinkholes.
Whenever I’ve read in the news about these unexpected voids opening at the surface
I was intrigued by the possibility of the unknown spaces lying underneath. The project was
a way of speculating about these spaces and representing them. With this in mind I contacted Colectivo 1050, a collective of artisans and designers working in Oaxaca, Mexico, a region extremely rich in vernacular culture and crafts. The shapes of the vessels were developed based on the techniques and archetypes used for local utilitarian pottery and we worked on site together to fire the pieces, achieving the dark, smoked effect. The final pieces were
finally suspended in custom wooden structures to represent a cross section of the underground voids.
It’s clear that your Mexican roots have a strong influence on all your work.
Do you spend a lot of time in Mexico? And how have these influences changed over time?
I go to Mexico once or twice year usually for very short periods, not more than 4 weeks a year. However I try to continually stay in touch and I like to use my visits as opportunities for collaborations. The relationship with my roots has certainly evolved overtime.
In my experience, when you live abroad you are constantly reconfiguring the notions you grew up with, but home always remains a central reference to making sense of the world.
I guess that my work ten years ago was a lot about understanding certain situations in the urban space that reflected cultural differences – from ad hoc assemblages to the informal use of colour. Now I am more focused on materiality. I really enjoyed working with traditional ceramics and I would like to work with other local materials.
What inspired you to create the covetable Cumulo glassware? Cumulo translates to Cumulus (as in cloud) and the pieces brilliantly work together by using the optical ‘Moiré effect’ in a simple, linear pattern. A delight.
In some of my work with textiles, including rugs and screen-printed upholstery, I had worked with linear pattern and I was always captivated by the dimensions that emerged from accidental overlapping. This interest was a combined with the research I do at Goldsmiths University where I spent some time exploring perforations and patterns for audio devices.
I looked a lot at the work of optical artists from the 60’s, such as Carlos Cruz Diez and Jesus Rafael Soto, who make an amazing use of the Moiré effect. For Cumulo I wanted the pattern to be the object itself, therefore glass was a perfect vehicle. I played with the idea of floating patterns that congregate and disperse, just like clouds. It was really interesting to me to see how a flat radial pattern could become three-dimensional.
You are part of OKAY studio, a collective of designers based in Stoke Newington, London. What do you enjoy about this collaboration with other designers and makers and how does it benefit your work?
I enjoy the company and the sense of movement in the studio, the feeling of ideas and objects taking shape. Even though we all work independently there are intersections, from exchanging the odd tip for doweling wood to an after work pint. What is interesting about the studio is that there is still a bit of the atmosphere of playground that I experienced at the RCA. It’s stimulating.