WEDNESDAY TALK // Simone Tops

For artist and maker Simone Tops, materials are not merely passive recipients of form, but active agents in the process of becoming. The objects are a result of the artist’s material experimentation which is shaped by an intimate technical knowledge of glass, steel, and leatherwork. These materials do not have fixed essences, rather they run in a continuum, matter into matter, surface into surface and form into form.

The emergent sculptural and architectural pieces are resultant of a desire to push materials to their outermost limits. The biomorphic forms that emerge from this process are not just a matter of visual resemblance or imitation, but a new form that is changed, as if almost elementally. In Studio Tops’s pieces, the organic and the industrial are not antithetical, but rather two aspects of a shared material reality, constantly entangled and interpenetrating.