Jaime Hayon’s Crystal Candy Set, a collection of nine pieces for Baccarat is the Grimm fairytale I’ve been looking for to saturate my unearthly, fantasy steeped dreams. Each one has an otherworldly feeling evoking images of curiosity cabinets full of locked secrets, wraithlike druggists’ jars lying in wait for jolted lovers and hastily buried desires. The sinister ruby reds, emerald greens, slightly tarnished gold and cut crystal conjure dreams of Absinthe drinkers lurching around in darkened corners to music no one can hear, culminating in blood being spilt after arguments over pocket watches and chipped gold coins.
Hidden behind a pillar in the space occupied by Droog, stands Luc d’Hanis and Sofie Lachaert’s high dark cabinet. Its pitch-black intimidation is just waiting to fall on those who try to divulge its secrets. Locked shut with a highly polished silver lock with seven ominous holes, you are forced to make a decision of which to try. Choose the wrong one and you might let out a gangly wizard imprisoned for killing hundreds with a melody box playing songs lulling listeners into eternal sleep, or perhaps you will lead yourself into a garden filled with poison ivy and spindly yews, guarding the love letters of history’s greatest villains. Each keyhole whispers a story and all it needs is your mind’s desire to manipulate each outcome. It is an imposing piece, too tall and thin, as if its home is a rickety house filled with creaky floor boards and broken windows sending wind whistling through the exposed rafters.
The walls of this imaginary abode would surely be covered with Front Design’s Shade mirrors. Their dark etchings expose the thin line between imagination and reality whilst scarring across the faces of those who dare look into them. Like Dorian Grey’s painting they have a twisted edge to them, sucking beauty inwards and projecting the damaged image of the viewer back.
These pieces could all happily sit in the set of a Tim Burton film, their oddly proportioned sizes and bareness hinting at hidden truths and untold stories. Their surfaces seem to either reflect too much light or swallow it up helping project a serious, steely edge in contradiction to light-hearted playfulness visible in many other products.
A shadier side to design is defiantly becoming visible to those with the capability to sway towards a morbid, shadowy and overactive imagination. Or perhaps they appeal to the darker side that is in all of us but requires a willingness to unlock it.
A similarity between the sinister twinkle sometimes visible in a stranger’s eyes and a darkness emanating from these products is very visible to me. Like all of us they contain dark secrets and stories but unlike human behavior, a desire for them to remain hidden is absent. A celebration of a darker kind has emerged and I will follow- just as soon as I have made friends with that gangly wizard….
Text: Emily McGeevor