The transmission from fashion to design and architecture is not new, and the work of Tzuri Gueta is an exiting example. Designer, artist, craftsman, scientist, and explorer Tzuri Gueta was always looking for materials and one encounter was to prove particularly decisive: silicone.
It quickly became his material of choice. He invented a technique that he called “lace fed with silicone” and took out a patent for the method. Spurred on by this impetus, he founded a company, Silka Design, and began to produce his own line of jewelry made of a mixture of textile and silicone. These pieces were imbued with such an innovative spirit that they almost immediately won over designers at the vanguard of fashion as well as venues dedicated to artistic creation, such as the Printemps du Design boutique at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the MoMA store in New York.
The dialogue between textile and silicone brought forth a resolutely modern collection with a natural look and feel inspired by the macroscopic world of the sea and the plant world. Tzuri Gueta jewelry tricks the senses by sowing discrepancies between what the eye sees and what the hand touches. The first encounter may be visual but the second is tactile, and only once you wear the jewelry, finger it, and let it slide over your skin, do you realize how sensual this surprising material is. Jewelry is shifting to a different scale, lengthening, multiplying and being transformed into lamps and chandeliers.
To develop the creation of objects, Tzuri Gueta works with designer Tony Jouanneau. Their first chandelier was Perle de Pluie (Bead of Rain), a light fixture permeated with an aquatic atmosphere imparted by silicone. Like a translucent cascade the silicone drops fall like pearls by the thousands, some of them illuminated with a poetic bluish halo. In 2009, Tzuri Gueta was awarded the City of Paris’s Grand Prix de la Création for his “cocoon” lamp. Mounted on a stalk made of silicone-coated bamboo, the lamp features modular cocoons that close up on it and diffuse soft, subdued light. This foray into the world of light continued at the request of Rare Architects.
For the interior decoration of the Town Hall Hotel in London, a luxury hotel nominated for Design Awards 2011, Gueta created a spectacular nine-square-meter chandelier suspended above the bar. He also made silicone-injected lace kakemonos for the walls and coverings for the lampshades. So not only for jewels, but also for design, and perhaps architecture? For more information www.tzurigueta.com