The Dwell 24: Isabel Rower

An artist who is the child of artists seems like they have that which evades many who want to enter the profession—parents who get it. And yet for Isabel Rower, whose father and mother are a sculptor/painter and photographer/ceramicist, respectively, their knowledge made them perhaps too aware of what she was entering into. "I think they were like, You already know how to do this," the New York–born and –based Rower says of her decision to go to the Rhode Island School of Art and Design, from which she graduated in 2020. "You should go get a degree in whatever."

Parental belief notwithstanding, that time certainly focused her. Originally intending to do video art ("And then I realized, I don’t live in the 1960s," she says, laughing), Rower cycled through a few mediums before landing in the school’s robust furniture design department. She found herself particularly drawn to ceramics, but the pandemic stymied her ability to produce an actually developed thesis. After graduation, back home in Brooklyn, she began using her mother’s backyard kiln, starting with plates and bowls (which she still sells, donating a portion of the proceeds to various organizations, a commitment she says came about because of her belief in wealth distribution) and moving on to pieces like Medusa Tulip Field, a 30-inch-by-30-inch ceramic furniture piece patterned in small, colored squares, which came about because of an accident.

"The first ceramic chair that I made when I was still in school exploded in the kiln," she recalls. "Basically, clay has a specific shrinkage rate, and because I’d never made anything before, I wrapped a piece that has a shrinkage rate of 10 percent in this skin of, almost like fondant, of other clay that has a shrinkage of 15 percent." While she’s since figured out the actual technique for preventing explosions, the result is a hard but soft-seeming art-slash-functional object. (The name comes from a vision Rower had of Medusa looking at Netherlands tulip fields from above, and turning them to stone.) "It’s actually incredibly comfortable, and it fits really well to the body, which is important to me," she says—a callback to the first chair she ever made in school, a reinterpreted travel toilet. "People are like, ceramic is such a fragile material. How can you sit on it? And it’s like, well, you sit on one every day."

While her work has spanned many mediums, from making a soft sculpture for Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s former home to other commissions such as bent laminated wood furniture, Rower finds herself returning to ceramics because they are "some of the oldest ever existing objects, and it’s how we’ve recorded a large amount of history." Plus, her admitted ambitiousness orients her as well: "It just constantly humbles you where you’re like, Oh, I can’t plan for this to be done, I really can’t know when this is going to be dry or what’s going to happen."

You can learn more about Isabel Rower by visiting the studio’s website or on Instagram.

Top image by Sophie Schwartz, courtesy Isabel Rower

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