Tick developed Future Tense, a new textile collection of five upholstery designs, for Luum.
Artist and textile designer Suzanne Tick, founder of Tick Studio, tries to focus on the present. Each day, her staffers meditate together in the office, which is housed in an East Village town house where Tick also lives. The meditation is a prelude to conversation, she explains: “We clear our minds and then…have a thoughtful discussion of what’s happening in culture, art, and architecture.” But in her work, which includes both her studio weaving practice and her commercial designs for Skyline Design, Tandus Centiva, and Luum (where she is creative director), the designer often finds herself pondering time, whether she’s mining movements in art or contemplating design’s future demands. Her new collection for Luum, Future Tense, alludes to this way of thinking.
The signature product in Future Tense, Schema, is a large-scale pattern that comes in six vibrant colorways. Tick, a history buff, explains she is fascinated by the creative period surrounding the First World War, when seismic social and political shifts prompted artists and designers to experiment with abstraction and surrealism. Tick and Meagan Phipps, Luum’s design director and a collaborator on Schema, note that early-20th-century designers and artists found ways to represent tension and change while offering visual pleasure. And though the bold patterns of Schema evoke a geometric, constructivist sensibility, surrealism also played a role in its design, which was created “in response to contemporary tensions,” according to Phipps. “We’re living in a surreal time,” she notes, in which people can create their own realities thanks to digital technology and social media.
The dialogue results in what Tick calls “a super graphic pattern that changes the dimensions of a space.” This adaptability is useful for “the ever-in-flux aesthetic demands of today’s offices,” which increasingly have to perform like the hospitality world. Schema allows interior designers to bring a wealth of color and pattern into a space, and add rich, woven texture.