An Exclusive Look at “Posture Vases” from Bloc Studios and Carl Kleiner
An Exclusive Look at “Posture Vases” from Bloc Studios and Carl Kleiner
The Collaboration Blends Functional Design With Expressive Art
Design:
Bloc Studios, Carl Kleiner
Project:
Posture Vases
Photography:
Carl Kleiner,
Courtesy of Bloc Studios
Words:
Erica Nichols
When Sara Ferron Cima, co-founder of Bloc Studios, discovered a series of postural flowers from Stockholm-based photographer Carl Kleiner, she knew they needed to collaborate. “I’d fallen in love with Carl’s series ‘Posture’ years ago,” she says. “I thought that those pictures were so beautiful that it was worth it to have something that beautiful in real life.”
Those pictures were of delicate flowers, posed and arranged to create unique shapes and movement. Kleiner’s series came about after experimenting with method to control the positions of the flowers and photograph them in a way that made them look almost alive. For the collaborative project, “Posture Vases,” Cima and Kleiner took the same idea, but expanded upon it with the help of Bloc Studio’s natural design perspective.
Founded in partnership with Massimo Ciuffi in 2014, Bloc Studios is a design brand that re-thinks functional design by transforming raw, natural stones into individualistic everyday objects. With marble as their main medium, the brand develops pieces that are each entirely different and that challenge us to rethink our perspectives on leftover materials. “My family’s import-export marble company had a lot of leftover materials from the industrial process,” says Cima. “We started to collect those leftover pieces and experiment with how we could give the marble a second chance.”
For “Posture Vases,” the same approach was taken not only with the marble design, but with creating a fresh perspective on an already-existing series. The flowers were mounted on a sculptural construction of metal wires and smooth marble bases, allowing for each flower to be positioned at different angles. The results were a series of eye-catching displays that, though united in idea and form, each told a unique, organic story.
