Julia Lohmann
Julia Lohmann was born 1977 in Hildesheim in Germany and came to the UK in 1998 to study a degree in Graphic Design at the University for the Creative Arts in Surrey. When she graduated in 2001 she won a series of prizes for her products design and graphics, including the Red Dot Design Award and iF Product Design Award both prestigious international design competitions who honour those students set to become the new trend setters of design working on at an exceptional quality. She then went on to study an MA at the Royal College of Art in Design Products, where upon graduation she yet again won more awards for her work and was exhibited at the Design Museum. Since then she has been exhibited in many coveted galleries and museum, including high-jacking a room for the day in the Tate Modern, and has been published in many design magazines including Icon and Wallpaper. She has since set up her own design studio in London, continuing to create her incredible work and tours the country giving lectures at various design schools.
Julia's work often challenges the viewers opinions and attitudes towards unusual materials and processes. Her work is not designed to upset or disturb the viewer but to simply make them aware of the world in which we live and digest everyday. Her use of materials and subjects vary greatly, everything from seaweed to cow stomachs, but it is the way in which she uses them which subsequently turns them from something repulsive to a thing of beauty and mystery. The stomach of a cow draws the viewer in through wonder, wanting to feel the texture of the piece before learning what it is made from and quickly becoming disgusted at the thought of what it is, even though we consume the animals flesh everyday in shocking quantities. She tries to highlight our disconnection from the living animal to the meat we eat on our tables. Her work seems to focus greatly on the waste all around us that we so rarely notice in our modern lives. She does not reject a material for fear it will upset the masses but celebrates them for the incredible things they are and this gains her much recognition throughout the world.
One project of hers I have been interested in during this project is her work using kelp, or seaweed, as a material and discovering its potential. In 2008 she was sponsored as one of the Stanley Picker research fellows to explore the potential of the material and subsequently came up with a series of lights and laminates to provide a cheaper and more sustainable material to the usual wood veneers. She uses two varieties, one an Irish green seaweed and the other a stronger brown Japanese kelp, before using them she must soak them to make the malleable and can then work them around geometric stands or into thin spirals wrapped around a bulb to show off the colours and translucency of the natural material, to preserve them they are then varnish. Their natural qualities are similar to plastics from the 1970's although far more beautiful and far less damaging to our environment. As well as the lights, she has created seaweed veneers, she dries out flat pieces before gluing them securely to table or seating surfaces and varnishing till a thick and durable coat can protect them.
I was also interested in her Cowbenches and her interest in creating benches out of just one hide of a cow. Each seat takes on the personality and name of the cow which died to cover it and is shaped to look like the cow did whilst alive and lying in the grass. She uses foam to for the padding and a thick rope to give the illusion and feeling when running your hands over it of the cows bones and spine. In usual leather sofas up to 8 cow hides will be used to cover it, this is so that all the marks and scars that show that it was once a living being can be removed, in so removing us from the animal. Although leather is a commonly used material, not only for sofas but also jackets and shoes, by bringing the material so closely back to its living shape she creates something of a controversy, in our modern lives nature has become the unusual and uncommon and we so rarely question anything around us.
As one of my main focuses for my project has been on lighting I looked at her Flock and Ruminant Blooms collections. Flock is made up of 50 preserved sheep stomachs hung from a ceiling and lit internally, she created this piece on her MA course and exhibited it at the Design Museum. This piece has set the scene for her career and was able to convey her inquisitive nature at an early stage. Ruminant Blooms, I think, follows on from this and is made from the stomachs of cows. Cow's have four stomachs, each performing a different kind of digestion and each with a unique surface texture, one has a distinctly honey-comb quality to it while the others create more of a lace effect when lit. The light inside the stomachs gives off a warm glow, inviting the viewer to touch and explore but then they find out what it is made from and find themselves wanting to reject the light as something disgusting, it is purely from our unfamiliarity that we react in this way, people have no idea what a cows stomach would look like and definitely not if lit so in a way Julia is educating the masses to forget their notions of the norm and to look beyond to see the beauty in everything in our fascinating world.
