Grace Prince's furniture pieces study the light juxtapositions between materials, surfaces, and alignment. In an open investigation, Prince aims to shift an element of the sensual field while fully preserving functionality.

Grace Prince b. 1992, London, based in Zürich. 

Prince's furniture pieces study the light juxtapositions between materials, surfaces, and alignment. In an open investigation, Prince aims to shift an element of the sensual field while fully preserving functionality. Without the use of ready-mades, each element is formed from her hand or in close collaboration with an artisan. Parallel to her practice she is a material researcher at the design studio Material Gesture, Prof. Anne Holtrop, ETH University.

Curatorial text by Federica Sala for solo show Entropy & Desire, Milan Design Week 2022:

To draw the intangible

Sensations not works.

Grace Prince’s work crystallises in seemingly random forms – but in reality, they are the fruit of extensive study and synthesis – some primary human sensations such as the sense of fragility, the lack of balance, and precariousness. Objects that, while fully preserving their functionality, are almost design haikus capable of synthesising what remains beneath the surface of things.

Not surprisingly, the artist’s research starts from fragments of thoughts, ideas and sensations which are then assembled into paper collages, an integral part of the work as a jumble of different emotions then composed within a final piece. A design suspended, as suspended as the changes in our lives, teach us a new way of looking at balance as if it were not a point of arrival but a point of rest.

The pieces in her collections are projects meticulously designed and made, partly by the artist, partly through collaborations with artisans, to be “objects in between.”

Indeed, it is the movement and tension between two different stages that take notoriety, moving away from an object’s innate static nature to which we are accustomed. In doing so, the artist succeeds in ascribing this intangible sensation of passage within a physical space, bounded by a series of different materials such as metal, glass, and wood, juxtaposed in a faux-random and almost childlike way, but actually the result of a very long exercise in minimalism.

Grace Prince’s work is thus almost photographic as if she can stop a three-dimensional temporal instant of a movement and in doing so makes us think about the importance of leaving doors open at all times, about the significance of not putting a period at the end of sentences