A one-off ceramic tile chair. Photograph by Lauren Coleman
Set Design by Victoria Petro-Conroy. In the making of ceramics, colour normally gets added towards the end. A vitreous glaze, composed largely of silica, can be brushed on neutral-hued clay, with which it fuses in the kiln, becoming an impervious, sometimes unexpected, often beautiful coating. But for the Bushwick, Brooklyn-based designer Cody Hoyt, 43, who creates vessels, furniture and wall pieces, his artistic process begins with vibrant pigments, typically dozens of them. Using a variation of a Japanese method called nerikomi, Hoyt tints white clay with powdered stains, then extrudes them into bars of varying thickness that he cuts and manipulates to create marbled tableaus, and geometries that recall those of M C Escher. His one-off pieces include this chair, constructed from handmade, sandblasted matt tiles applied to a simple wooden frame. In some places, the pattern, which Hoyt creates in the moment, seems highly pixelated; in others, as soft as a watercolour. “Sometimes I listen to Philip Glass while I work,” he says. “You get into a space and it all just happens.”
Cody Hoyt Square chair, price on request, thefutureperfect.com.
