kathy dalwood design home          cast (sculpture, design)      public sculpture        reflectmirrors          shift interior design           kathydalwood@Habitat         contact

                 Grand Masters feature 2008

Casting a spell
Words: Iona Singleton
Photography: Thomas Stewart

                                   1 

At the age of seven, Kathy Dalwood hung up her
ballet slippers and set out on a path that would
eventually lead her to become a successful
designer whose pieces can be found in homes all
over the world, thanks to a recent collaboration
with Habitat. Today, working primarily in plaster
and concrete, her latest creations include
sculptural planters, vases and tiles, whose
monochrome surfaces are indented with bold
motifs borrowed from disparate architectural
styles such as Modernism and the Baroque.

‘My mother used to drop me and my sister off at
the town hall for ballet lessons,’ remembers Kathy.
‘But I hated them, so I began sneaking off to the
library to pore over all the books on interiors –
I could sit and look at the pictures for hours.’

At this early age, Kathy also whiled away many
an hour in the studio of her father, Hubert
Dalwood, a prominent sculptor in the Sixties
and Seventies, who cast his bold abstract works
in bronze and aluminium. It was at her father’s
feet that her penchant for plaster was born, as
she and her sister played with bits of clay and
attempted plaster casting for the first time.
Given this nascent love of all things three dimensional,
why did she go on to study painting at university?
‘It was a big mistake,’ she says ruefully.
Frustrated by the limitations of this
medium, Kathy soon dropped out of college and
went into teaching instead. But she couldn’t
suppress her creative tendencies for long. In a
display of reinvention that is characteristic of her
designs, she woke up one morning and decided it
was time to get back into creative work. She soon
made up for lost time, designing a range of
furniture based on the multifaceted, wonky café
tables and stools seen in Cubist paintings.

      2

‘They were functional, but they had a sculptural
edge to them, which I would say is true of all my
work. I think of myself as a sculptor, really.’

It was the late Eighties: Thatcher was prime
minister and the City was experiencing its
legendary ‘big bang’ that, in turn, fuel-injected
the design trade. ‘The word “designer” went from
being a noun to an adjective: everyone was
talking about “designer” clothes and furniture,’
says Kathy. ‘It was really at the beginning of that
whole boom in design as we know it now.’
Launching her new career in this era gave her
the freedom to experiment with one-off pieces,
selling through interior designers, shops and
galleries that specialised in unique designs.
As well as creating colourful furniture, she
experimented with rococo shapes in wrought
iron and made dramatic chandeliers with
bespoke pieces of glass made for her by a
company specialising in scientific implements.

Then, 10 years ago, a chance encounter with
a computer hard drive led her to return to her
plaster-casting roots. ‘Looking at its geometric
shape and the surface details, such as the lines of
the ventilation grill, I could see its potential as
a piece of abstract sculpture,’ says Kathy. The unfortunate
bit of kit was swiftly disassembled and used, along with
other pieces of electronic equipment, to create a mould for
a collection of vases made from plaster and concrete, which
subsequently sold like hot cakes.

‘I just completely fell in love with the process of casting,’
she says. ‘You take away the mould and you have this
riveting moment when you’ve just created an object out
of nothing. In that second when it comes out, your gut
tells you whether it’s worked or not.’

               3    

Kathy is a big fan of the work of Britart sculptor Rachel
Whiteread, but whereas Whiteread’s casts of the empty
spaces of baths or the underside of chairs become
immediate pieces of art, Kathy uses casting as part of a
design process. ‘I kept the idea of abstraction but felt I had
to make more conscious aesthetic decisions,’ she explains.
Decisions such as pairing two seemingly incompatible
architectural styles – the pure geometry of Modernism and
the elaborate ornamentation of the Baroque – to create her
satisfyingly sculptural range of concrete planters. ‘I love the
flat planes you find in Modernism and civil engineering, so
when I became interested in the Baroque, I wanted to look
at it in a new context by combining elements from the two
periods.’ The result is a series of individually cast planters,
whose boxy shapes and smooth surfaces are indented
with voluptuous baroque curls and garlands inspired by
eighteenth-century facades.

Kathy cites London’s iconic Southbank Centre as a source
of inspiration for her recent Habitat collection, which came
about when their head of design and accessories spotted herstylish modernist Setsquares tiles and commissioned her to create a new line of tiles and vases for their stores.
‘I see buildings as sculptures, so it’s very easy for me to reduce their scale and turn them into domestic objects,’ she says.
Her simple casting method mirrors that used to create the
concrete building blocks of the Southbank Centre. Suddenly,
her work was in stores all over the world. ‘It was fantastic to
see the finished pieces because they were so brilliantly made and they stuck very closely to my original prototypes.’

The prototypes were made in Kathy’s studio – a large, sunlit
room on the first floor of the home that she shares with her
partner, artist Justin Mortimer. The air is thick with the smell
of the latex that is setting in moulds on the floor, and a thin
layer of plaster dust has settled over every surface. Books and maquettes jostle for space on the shelves that line the pale walls, and above her desk, rows of casts inspired by industrial grain silos stand side-by-side with an assortment of miniature Louis XV chairs. Among the works of art on display is a painting by Justin of a black bin bag – an example of how this couple give new meaning to overlooked objects.

Inside, cool white walls and grey-painted floors provide
the perfect neutral backdrop to showcase the couple’s
colourful finds, collected on regular visits to French street
markets and a recent trip to Georgia, USA, which they spent
rummaging in thrift stores.

       4

‘Our home is like our very own Sir John Soane’s
Museum (a house built by Soane as a resting
place for his own works of art), in that it houses
our many collections,’ laughs Kathy.

Her passion for reinvention, so obvious in her design
work, is also evident in the way in which these
once-humble objects are lovingly displayed
throughout the house – in the living room,
clusters of cut-glass candlesticks picked up in
local charity shops glint in the light that pours
in from the generously proportioned windows;
old tapestries have been transformed into stylish
cushions or used to upholster chairs, and
reproduction Louis XV-style furniture has been
given a new lease of life with a lick of paint.

In the kitchen, sleek units, designed by Kathy,
are topped with worktops reclaimed from school
science laboratories – here and there you can
still see the graffiti etched into their surfaces.
Cantilevered cupboard doors house the couple’s
more everyday objects. In addition to her
sculptural work, Kathy runs a successful interior
design business, Shift, injecting her successful
blend of simple white spaces filled with colourful
French period furniture and accessories into
other people’s home. ‘The first thing I usually
do for my clients is rationalise the space by
designing cupboards and hidden storage
systems. I believe that everything you own
should have a designated home.’

Upstairs lies the bathroom, with its sculptural
modern basin and eighteenth-century-style
wallpaper, and a master bedroom, with views
of the garden’s enormous lilac tree and carefully
curated selection of her planters. The guest
bedroom is home to a set of china figurines, some
of which Kathy has cast in stark grey concrete
as part of her new, more figurative designs.
‘I love the monochrome of my work, but after
our long holidays in France, it’s great coming
back to our colourful home,’ enthuses Kathy.
‘I suppose, in an ideal world, I’d like to live in an
eighteenth-century French chateau,’ she laughs,
‘but it would probably have to have a modernist
studio built on the back.’?

   click to view PDF version                                        

  selected press (with links to appropriate collection)

concrete figurine collection

                     concrete urn sculpture           

 concrete urn sculpture and concrete baroque  tiles  

                                            

concrete planters &
concrete urn sculpture

                       


concrete swag planter

bathroom sculpture                                       
concrete soap dish collection

       kathy dalwood design home          cast (sculpture, planters, tiles)      public sculpture      reflectmirrors      shiftinterior design           kathydalwood@Habitat            contact