By Gabrielle Kennedy
The master-apprentice relationship in craft and design is still common throughout East Asia and many Asian students leave for Europe saying they are eager to escape the tradition.
But if one looks closely at some of Design Academy Eindhoven teacher-student relationships in a more formal way, strains of this ancient method of working still exist to great effect. A good example is Tijmen Smeulders who was clearly influenced by the mentorship provided by his teacher, Aldo Bakker.
Smeulders interned with Bakker during his studies, and although Bakker’s influence is clear, Smeulders quickly managed to find that critical point when mimicking ends and one’s own fascinations start to fly.
“A lot of my work utilizes the effects of light and shadow, and I also incorporate textures, which to me can be more important than even shape,” Smeulders says.
This past Christmas the Design Academy Eindhoven explored the Smeulders-Bakker relationship by asking Smeulders to create the school’s Christmas gift. Last year Bakker was asked to design the gift and he came up with a small pitcher. Smeulders’ own object – a plateau - reacted to the pitcher by zooming in on the skin of a product in order to further explore the relation between colour, texture, light and shape.
The idea was to turn a skin - consisting of texture and colour - into a product, and Smeulders chose porcelain as his material for the freedom it afforded him to really explore the topic.
The object looks as if Smeulders has literally lifted sheets of clay over two end arches – a structural foundation he has borrowed from architecture – to create a volume. The arches develop into something more organic by following the characteristics of porcelain, which deforms and follows gravity.
Over this shape he sprayed on an extra layer of clay, which contained the same colour pigments, to create a rough granular textured skin. The skin is so intriguing that it ends up working as the main feature of the object.
“I did a lot of colour research,” Smeulders explains. “I wanted something very rich so that different points on the object can be activated and deactivated depending on where the light hits.”
On the Master-Apprentice relationship Smeulders says: “A lot of reflection takes place in Aldo’s studio and to endlessly talk with him about shaping and colouring was very valuable to me.”