From the living room, her collection spills into a narrow hallway - where an array of hats and handbags hang on several of Wood’s frilly tonguelike Murano glass hooks and artworks cover the walls from floor to ceiling - before continuing into her bedroom, which houses a wavy Ultrafragola mirror by the postmodern Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, a founder of the radical Memphis Group, and a tangled, tubular neon glass light made specially for Wood by her friend the London-based glass artist Jochen Holz to illuminate a 1970s floral textile that she received in an exchange with a Brazilian gallerist on a trip there in 2014, and which is now pinned above Wood’s bed. For her current exhibition, “ Ornate,” at Milan’s Nilufar Gallery, for example, she drew inspiration from Japanese kimono fabrics, Victorian boudoirs and the anatomy of insects, presenting works such as scalloped aluminum cabinets with thin curving legs, yellow and green glass light fixtures that evoke hard candies and an aluminum and brass headboard formed from a shimmering profusion of gold and purple squiggles.Ĭollaboration is intrinsic to Wood’s practice, and many of the objects that populate her home are the result of partnerships or swaps. Incorporating references that range from Modernist Mexican architecture to the output of British wood veneer factories, she creates pieces, often produced in collaboration with brands such as Hermès and Tory Burch, that reach into design history and ask questions about globalism and authenticity, while also conjuring dreamlike new worlds. Indeed, Wood’s work has long explored the emotional potency of regional palettes - from the earthy grays of London to the saturated blues of Venice - as well as the manipulative capacity of industrial materials like laminate that are designed to imitate others. “It’s the thing I most use as a language.” “I’ve always been fascinated by digesting places through color,” she says. The walls are painted in shades of peach, pistachio and mauve, the wood floors are covered in vibrant geometric rugs and everywhere are unusual objects that Wood has made or collected: Pyrex lamps modeled after floral bouquets a side table made from Play-Doh-like ropes of extruded pastel plastic. And as anyone familiar with Wood’s Wisteria chandelier (a luminous explosion of hand-dyed PVC petals) or her Super Fake series of irregularly shaped rugs that riff on the variegated layers of sedimentary rocks might expect, her own 575-square-foot unit is a dazzling ode to the hues and textures that energize her. It’s an apt home for an artist whose practice centers on the creation of wildly colorful furniture, lighting, homewares and textiles. The British designer Bethan Laura Wood’s apartment is on the second floor of a 1925 Art Deco building in East London that has powder pink stairwells, mint green window frames and baby blue accents.
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