Totem Table

The Totem Table takes the studio's totem vocabulary and applies it to furniture. Where the totems climb toward light, this one stops at 22 inches and holds a surface — a fluted drum, a smooth ovoid, a ribbed collar and a studded top, stacked in sequence over a mild steel armature.

Each segment is thrown and finished by hand, then glazed in one of two tones — an egg white and a warmer nude — set alternately up the stack so no two adjacent forms share a colour. The break between them does the work a seam would otherwise do.

It began as a question we kept returning to: whether the sculptural language of the lamps could carry weight rather than light. The answer holds a cup of coffee, and reads as an object the rest of the time.