The Artist Crafting Fantastical Headpieces From Watches, Seashells and Stuffed Animals

“Wearable artwork” is a label utilized with some abandon within the trend world, however there’s no different solution to describe the artistic director Eric Tobua’s astonishing, usually skyscraping headpieces. The Bangkok-based 39-year-old’s wild constructions have included a crown of snake and pig bones; a hat constituted of a stuffed-animal skunk; and a 2018 piece he calls “Hungry for Love, Hungry for All the pieces,” a headdress from which dangle plastic and resin replicas of bubble tea, ice cream and mango sticky rice. His huge helmet of pretend luxurious purses and jewellery — titled “We Purchase Issues We Don’t Want With Cash We Don’t Need to Impress Folks We Don’t Like” (2020) — is, he says, a commentary on consumerism and waste, subjects he has additionally addressed with a collection of fast-decomposing masks, one made from durian (a notoriously pungent fruit native to Southeast Asia) and one other from okra and bitter gourd.

A local of Khon Kaen, a northeastern province of Thailand, Tobua studied ballet as an undergraduate earlier than transferring to London to enroll within the artwork and design program at Central Saint Martins. After incomes his diploma, he was a stylist’s assistant in Bangkok, the place considered one of his first assignments was to craft runway equipment for a neighborhood trend present. His creations — specifically a sprawling, spiky headpiece harking back to a lionfish and constituted of plastic straws, ostrich feathers and scraps of leather-based — led to commissions from musicians and tv reveals, together with the Thai model of “The Masked Singer.”

At the moment, his purchasers are largely worldwide: To rejoice the opening of a present by the Spanish painter Miquel Barceló, the Fondation Beyeler museum, outdoors of Basel, Switzerland, hosted a gala for which Tobua’s pal the Paris-based Thai chef Rose Chalalai Singh created the menu and Tobua made a whole lot of seashell-adorned crowns and hats topped with papier-mâché fish for company to put on, many with collected objects discovered alongside the seashores of Majorca, the place Barceló was born. Like Barceló, Tobua usually turns to marine life for inventive inspiration. His fantasy undertaking, he says, could be “a creative message despatched from the ocean.” One thought: an underwater sculpture that will evolve right into a marine habitat. Says Tobua, “I dream of coral reefs rising upon my work.” — John Wogan

Roberto Lugo was a 25-year-old community-college scholar when he first sat down at a pottery wheel. “I took an artwork class as a result of I didn’t wish to write a paper,” he says.

As a Puerto Rican child rising up in northeast Philadelphia, Lugo by no means dreamed of turning into a potter, a lot much less one whose work is now within the everlasting collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork and the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork, amongst others. At the moment, the artist — who went on to earn a B.F.A. from the Kansas Metropolis Artwork Institute and an M.F.A. from Penn State — makes ceramics that reinterpret basic kinds by the lens of hip-hop tradition and his personal childhood. His hand-painted variations of 18th-century Sèvres porcelain vases, English teapots and historic Greek urns mix conventional ornamental motifs with portraits of figures like Stacey Abrams, the Infamous B.I.G. and Cornel West — “folks of colour who don’t often find yourself on porcelain,” he says. Amongst his best-known work is “Digable Underground,” a stoneware urn embellished with graffiti and renderings of Harriet Tubman and Erykah Badu, now within the everlasting assortment of the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York.

The 41-year-old Lugo, who has a brand new present on the Cincinnati Artwork Museum (the place it’s on view by September), is making ready for his first solo presentation in New York with R & Firm in August, whereas educating ceramics at Philadelphia’s Tyler Faculty of Artwork and Structure at Temple College and making “on a regular basis” pots and cups, as he calls them, which he sells at villagepotter215.com.

A number of years in the past Lugo made himself a T-shirt that reads, “Pottery saved my life.” He wears it on a regular basis however not — as one may assume — paradoxically. “I’m from the ghetto,” he says. “I always remember how I might have simply ended up on a distinct path.” — Catherine Hong

The story of excessive jewellery in Europe is usually mentioned to have originated greater than 100 years in the past, when family-run ateliers started opening on Paris’s Place Vendôme. However Laurence Graff, the London-based founder and chairman of Graff, has all the time reveled in a counternarrative. Now 84, he nonetheless celebrates his begin as a scrappy East Finish teen within the mid-Fifties, repairing Victorian baubles whereas planning to change into a world diamond entrepreneur — having the stones mined, after which sprucing, designing and promoting the completed items. As his boutiques proliferated, he purchased up most of the world’s best-known tough diamonds, together with the honey-colored 299-carat Golden Empress and the 1,109-carat Lesedi La Rona — on the time, the biggest found in over a century — and lower them into beautiful gems. Such showstoppers function enduring inspiration for the home’s audacious model, epitomized by these new earrings: every an almost three-inch tower of big Colombian emeralds — 26 carats in all — capped by a flamboyant trio of pear-shaped diamonds lower to catch even the softest night gentle. Graff emerald-and-diamond earrings, worth on request, graff.com. — Nancy Hass

Photograph assistant: TJ Elias. Set designer’s assistant: Steven Ruggiero

In Bathtub, England, simply off the Royal Crescent — the spectacular semicircle of 18th-century terrace homes acquainted to followers of Jane Austen movie diversifications — stands an imposing Palladian-style townhouse constructed from the area’s distinctive golden-tinged ashlar stone. The bottom ground of the constructing, which dates again to the 1760s, has been dwelling for the previous 4 years to the Bathtub outpost of 8 Holland Road, the London gallery and design retailer. Beginning subsequent month, for the primary time, the upstairs residence can be open for personal stays. Accessed by way of an Ionic pedimented porch, the four-story inside features a drawing room with an oversize Venetian window and Regency stone fire; a Shakeresque Plain English kitchen crammed with colourful ceramics; and three bedrooms, one with its personal roll-top bathtub and dressing room. Impressed by the properties of collectors like Peggy Guggenheim and Jim Ede, 8 Holland Road’s proprietor, Tobias Vernon, has stuffed the place with an array of Twentieth-century European and Scandinavian furnishings, trendy crafts and artworks starting from midcentury St. Ives Faculty work to up to date items by David Shrigley. And with current-day collectors in thoughts, all of it — together with the Guillerme et Chambron eating desk, the Paolo Buffa rocking chair and the Märta Måås-Fjetterström wall hanging — is on the market. Costs from about $3,900 for 3 nights, 8hollandstreet.com. — Aimee Farrell

One other Factor: Hun Chung Lee’s Pillowy Ceramic Stools

The artwork world has by no means fairly recognized what to make of ceramics. Is a glazed object much less consequential than a Classical plaster bust? Can a vase meant to carry dahlias examine to an oil portray? Hun Chung Lee, 56, who splits his time between studios in Los Angeles and Seoul, the place he was born, additional complicates how pottery is regarded. Over 30 years, utilizing a hand-built kiln, he has sculpted a set of craggy, one-of-a-kind furnishings: chairs, desks, tables and this most up-to-date grouping of pillowy stools. By making use of layers of radiant celadon glazes over a interval of days in a course of impressed by a method first formulated within the fifteenth century, he builds a posh inner all-clay armature for every hole piece. No matter class these works belong in — artwork, design or one thing else fully — their monumental magnificence endures. Value on request, r-and-company.com. — Nancy Hass

Photograph assistant: Maeve FitzHoward