The Polish-born artist and designer Małgorzata Bany has a peculiar (and very particular) obsession with off-white objects. The one between us on her dining table – an ostrich egg from Germany – is a case in point. Bany saw several of them collecting dust on the top shelf of a supermarket. “I don’t speak very good German,” she admits, “but eventually someone understood me and helped me choose this perfect egg.”
Outsized eggs are just one inspiration for Bany, whose live-work space is a serene haven in an industrial area in Seven Sisters, north London. In the year they have lived here, Bany and her partner, Tycjan Knut, have transformed the place. “We did the work really quickly,” she says. “Everything was painted. The sofa, dining table and bed frame were all made by us. The kitchen and shelves, too. The Ikea cupboards are the only things we haven’t made.”
This is the couple’s first home together. Knut, a painter, moved from Warsaw to join Bany, whose sculpted objects are sold by the New Craftsmen (a luxury craft and homewares shop in Mayfair) and increasingly sought after. Last year, Bany’s work was recognised by Elle Deco as a “future collectible”.
“This was our best decision ever,” says Knut. “In Warsaw, we never lived and worked in the same place. We spent many nights talking about being able to make it happen.”
“The whole reason for the move was to stop working late nights in a cold studio, feeling a bit hungry,” Bany adds. “We still work a lot – sometimes until 3am – and the weekend is an abstract concept to us, but at least here we are moderately comfortable and more efficient with our time. It’s important.”
The flat is on the first floor of a red-brick warehouse (there’s a car mechanic on the ground floor). The open-plan space is divided into kitchen, dining, living and sleeping quarters and there are two more rooms: a bright, north-facing studio for Knut and his canvases, and a room for Bany and her sculpting equipment: cardboard and foam casts, modelling tools and vats of Jesmonite – the rapid-setting composite material from which her smooth, solid objects are created.
Bany studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, the Falmouth School of Art and the Slade before segueing into sculpture and design. “I wanted to make something purely for art’s sake but reminiscent of something that you handle, something that you are meant to touch and use.”
Her Pilotis range is inspired by modernist support columns. “It became a personal challenge to take one simple shape and make as many variations of that as possible,” Bany explains. The range includes a console table, side table and table-top platter. Each piece is minimal and utilitarian, and the proportions are altered according to usage. “I think of form first. The struggle is to apply the function.”
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
