The Design Division at CCA welcomes Katie Gong as our final speaker in the 2022 Fall Design Lecture Series. These live lectures bring us together across time zones and disciplines as we meet leading designers, strategists, curators, and educators to speak about contemporary practice, discourse, and making.
Katie Gong’s talk hosted by the furniture program, is a humble and accessible record of her admirable career. She starts with her roots, sitting at the knee of two creative grandparents who instilled a love of form exploration and a sense of agency for responding to materials. After her undergraduate degree she worked for the retail store Anthropologie, where she built massive window displays on tight time and budget, honing her inventive sourcing and production techniques. When she outgrew that job and its ethical compromises, she bravely struck out on her own and rented a studio in a condemned building. From small commissions to large, for clients famous and unknown, she describes taking anything that came her way “always trying to keep it running;” balancing life as a mother, a wife, a production furniture maker and a sculptor. She works from a 'can-do' stance and has created complete environments for bars and restaurants as glimpsed through gorgeous interior shot that she casually flips through. She is clear that it wasn’t easy, that things didn’t fit through doors, that ceilings had to be cut, that she was constantly hoping and scrapping. But after years of doing everything others asked for, and doing it beautifully, she has earned time, and a reputation, to make her own mark. She finds herself drawn to a limited palette of steamed ratan, making twisting, knotted sculptures that feel like drawings, and that hang across spaces or against the wall. It’s a treat to watch her chart the path, and a reminder of how brave we must be, and how hard we must work to make a life in the studio.
Authored by Sarahleah Fordyce
23 июл 2023
