EDGER VASE

These ceramics occupy the middle ground between fine art and functional design. Concrete edgers litter suburban gardens, but when transported indoors they transform our “living landscape” into the defensive space of a traditional “man’s castle.” As Werner Hoffman writes, “I suspect that in crenellation we have the basic figuration or prototype of the regularity that makes our housing estates, business premises, and office blocks both aggressive and defensive, in equal measure. From this lining-up there at length evolved the coordinate system of vertically and horizontally aligned zones of windows and, as a final result, the grid of curtain wall which dispels the external distinction between wall and window. The formal convention is impenetrable from without, and within its coordinates tolerates no contradiction or departure from the pattern: everything is ‘all smooth.’

Designer: Micah Heimlich, 2019, featured in show Domestic Disturbance with Antoinette Adams