Flower pyramid
Date: 2008
Commissioned by: Royal Tichelaar Makkum (NL) (available here)
Type: Limited edition
Hella Jongerius believes that the archival records of a museum or company achieve their fullest impact when placed in a new context. In order to accomplish that, her creations frequently combine the best of two worlds that may at first seem incompatible: handicraft and industry, the old and the new. Through unorthodox production methods, she presents a fresh, contemporary interpretation of treasures from the past, a new way of looking at traditional patterns, motifs and forms.
Her projects that take archives as their subject matter include Prince and Princess (1996) for the Princessehof Museum in Leeuwarden, 7 pots/3 centuries/2 materials (1997), in which she used shards from the collection of Museum Boijmans van Beuningen Rotterdam, Delfts Blue B-set (1999) for Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Repeat (2002) for the textile manufacturer Maharam in New York, Animal Bowls and Nymphenburger Sketches for the porcelain manufacturer Nymphenburg in Munich, Paravent (2005) for Cooper-Hewitt, the National Design Museum in New York, and Non Temporary (2005) for Tichelaar in Makkum.
The tulip vase that she designed for Tichelaar in 2008 alludes to traditional tulip vases in both form and decoration. The precisely painted motifs of the past now give way to a pattern of blue stripes while the entire form has been perforated with the number of holes, increasing from bottom to top. Despite the heaviness of the material, the piece that emerges seems ephemeral, almost rarefied. The handle and the straps allow the vase to function as a mobile object, challenging the nature of a static showpiece. Therefore the vase is not displayed upright, but hung on the wall.
Through a blend of traditional motifs, perforations of the form and contemporary additions, Jongerius conducted a tactile investigation into the difference between a historical showpiece and a contemporary design object.