Sculptural Triple Candle Holder Handcrafted of Organic Beeswax and Clay

About the Designers:

Works of Rooms Studio refers to the sculptural forms and abundant materials in juxtaposition with the feminine instincts. Born and raised in Tbilisi, Georgia, the duo behind the Rooms, Nata Janberidze and Keti Toloraia, lean towards preserving the inherited craftsmanship techniques unique to the region.

Massive wood and stone objects are hand-crafted using traditional techniques to create raw and symbolic forms often rooted in the designers’ childhood memories. Growing up in a culturally diverse environment, where the two worlds – Western and Eastern collide, remarkably influenced their design language.

Over the years, Rooms has created eight independent collections and collaborations equally memorable and representative of the duo’s perpetual mission to bring life to omitted elements of a former life. Through their series of works, Janberidze and Toloraia try to examine the boundaries between the public and private. Experiencing adolescent years in the 90s – a significant decade of cultural and societal shifts – their work is a narrative of personal experiences of womanhood. By contrasting the new feminine monumental shapes with architectural brutality, Rooms challenges the status quo and also bridges the conventional and contemporary design with a confluence of female energy.

The studio’s largest U.S. exhibition to date, Distant Symphony, expands upon this impulse to focus inward. The title is again a chief concern—some of the objects included here were designed during the pandemic, under a regime of forced isolation that made the studio’s typically collective work process untenable. The pieces shown here are the results of Rooms’ search for a way forward. The first room, an antechamber of sorts, evokes the intimate quality of a private home. Shown here are trinkets and personal effects chosen by Janberidze and Toloraia for their emotive qualities; a low background noise emphasizes the climate of urban domesticity. The ensuing gallery space features highlights of Rooms’ recent design output. Here, the subtle scent of organic materials provides a sensory indication of the atelier’s interest in dichotomies: natural and man-made, personal and collective, local and cosmopolitan.  

In light of the global circumstances at the time, Janberidze and Toloraia felt it was especially important to pursue collaborative work. Rooms invited three artists—Shotiko Aptsiauri, Salome Chigalashvili and Mariana Chkonia—to conduct a dialogue and shared design process. As such, this exhibition is a kind of polyphonic meditation on a need for solitude and desire for companionship. The practice of polyphonic singing, essential to Georgian folk culture, is reinterpreted here as a design endeavor. Chigilashvili, working with unprocessed yarn, interpreted folk motifs by adapting embroidery to the scale of furniture with expansive stitches applied to painted boards. Whereas Aptsiauri proposed beeswax as a material solution for the Sacral Geometry collection, to which the wax stool and candle holder on view belong—the haptic qualities of these pieces will be familiar to anyone who has seen beekeepers tending to their hives in the Georgian countryside or watched candles burn inside a Georgian church.