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I think I've always felt like a builder, but growing up as a girl  to parents of a generation where that wasn’t the norm, it took a while to fully realize.

My earliest memory of creating is when I was 8 years old. I remember sitting beneath a holly tree, making a tiny bird’s nest out of twigs and mud. My parents must have noticed my need to keep my hands busy, becuase by my 9th birthday, I had been gifted a sewing machine along with lessons at a local fabric shop. I was the only child in a class surrounded by grandmothers, but I didn’t mind. By the end of the lessons, I had learned how to make curtains for a little plywood house I was constructing for my cat. It seems I’ve always been drawn to making a home for one thing or another.

 

Growing up, my mother, an eccentric and self-described collector of artist, encouraged me to pursue a formal art education after an artist friend of hers recognized my talent for painting.  At school, I felt pulled from the idea of creating art for art’s sake, disconnected from the singular use of a work of art. I felt more than that, but was unsure what that meant. I carried on, picking up metalworking and woodworking alongside my painting major and exploring as much as I could of a favorite theme: dwellings, or explorations of place and home and what really defined the two. An interest in a more tactile, constructive approach to fine arts led to a thesis project that explored this theme through layers of wallcoverings and the evolution of floor plans in older homes. Plywood and encaustics, two materials that could be manipulated together like construction materials, became my materials of choice.

 

My love of the tactile nature and quick working time of encaustics led to an immediate connection to plaster when introduced to the medium years later. In between, time spent in theatre scene shops and furniture shops led to a working knowledge of various tools and construction and finishing methods. Only really making the connection in retrospect, I had managed to end up in professional environments that allowed me the space and resources to develop and pursue my own creative interests. Being an artist is never about knowing or admitting you’re an artist. If you are, you can't help it.  The introduction of plaster offered a means of pursuit of artistic ideas under the more familiar guise of construction. Working with plaster is expressive and quick when wet and but slow and almost meditative once dry. It also feels familiar, a material I had spent my childhood surrounded by. Connected to home without even trying.

 

Plaster, as a working material, has existed in some form as long as civilization itself. From a wall covering in ancient Egypt and Middle Eastern homes to more ornamental use on Roman facades and sculptures, plaster has also managed to exist simultaneously in both the lexicon of modern construction and fine art. The historical dual purposefulness of plaster along with its roots in a collective history make it an ideal material.

In 2020, our young family moved from NYC to Maine. Along with the shifting collective views of the time regarding what defined connection and place, I was thrust into a period of reconnecting with my own thoughts on home. Our environment shifted from a 400 square foot apartment to 2,500 square foot house. Years spent thoughtfully paring belongings became an opportunity for reflection on the value in the choices we make regarding our environments.

 

I found myself met with an overriding desire to reduce a home to its essence. A place to prepare food, a place to sleep. A desire to achieve a simplicity that conveys the core meaning of home more effectively than intricate detail. For an object to function in an essential way in the home, it should underscore the essence of home. In this, the concept of timelessness plays a crucial role. Timelessness provides a sense of stability, familiarity and belonging that transcends the passage of time. It makes a space feel anchored and consistently welcoming, regardless of changing life circumstances and external trends.

 

These thoughts, coupled with an ever-present need, as it could be called, to create, led to a natural desire to explore the idea of designing more functional art for the home, i.e., furnishings. A painting, a lamp, and a fireplace can all hold equal aesthetic or artistic value. And, if they can, shoudn’t they?

 

Miles & Fogg is a lighting and furniture design studio born of this desire to create objects, that, in a home reduced to its essence, will exist both usefully and timelessly. Each object must pass a hypothetical test where, if the objects in a given room were reduced to a handful, does this one object have enough practical, aesthetic, and sustained significance to make the cut?

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