Art-meets-function in Indigenous furniture and design
Interior designer Destiny Seymour wants to see Indigenous patterns displayed in homes, not just museums. SUBMITTED/SUPPLIED
FROM CARPETING INSPIRED by Indigenous pottery markings to stools shaped like cigarette butts as a commentary on littering, a niche is forming in interior design as practitioners respond to a lack of Indigenous-designed furniture, home goods and textiles on the market.
Destiny Seymour, an Anishinaabe and Cree interior designer based in Winnipeg, Man. specializes in creating textiles and other patterned materials after years of struggling to find fabrics for Indigenous design projects.
Seymour became interested in patterns Indigenous to Manitoba about 10 years ago after visiting the Manitoba Museum and getting a behind-the-scenes look at pottery and bone tools a curator friend was cataloguing.
“They were over 3,000 years old, and he was showing me these cooking pots and they had all these markings,” she says. “Some were elaborate, some were very, very simple, but everything was so beautiful.”
She says holding these early – and in some cases, ancestral – home goods stuck with her, and she wanted the patterns in homes, not just museums. Seymour took a printmaking class and experimented with getting the patterns onto different fabrics. She hired local sewers to make tea towels for her to print the patterns on, and so came her company, Indigo Arrow’s first product.
Originally selling home goods like tea towels and pillows, Seymour has shifted to manufacturing rolls of patterned fabric, for architects and interior designers to source for commercial projects. “Take a health care centre for example, if they need a banquette and they want to put a local pattern on it, they can now source it,” she says. She also uses the fabrics on her own line of stools called Drum Stools, often purchased for community buildings and schools.
For Seymour, this work is about reviving the patterns, and she works closely with her father through the design process. “I give him tobacco and I talk about what I’m trying to say with the pattern and where it came from.” Her father, fluent in Anishinaabemowin, then helps her name the patterns.
Seymour has a carpeting line in the works with Milliken Floor Covering. The collection, set to be released later this year, is called Nibi (water) and comes in six colourways and five patterns, all named after forms of water, like river, snow, and rain, in Anishinaabemowin.
“I really wanted to get the message across that this is about renewal, and I want the collection to feel like a celebration of the patterns,” she says.
Ashley J MacDonald, an Upper Cayuga First Nation interior designer based in Niagara, Ont., makes sculptures that double as furniture. She serves a different market, with buyers looking for standout pieces for their homes, home staging, film sets, cafés and galleries.
To her, furniture tells stories. “You’re telling your life story by the pieces you choose to surround yourself with,” she says. “Furniture is the most interactive art you purchase, and you deal with it every single day, from the kettle you choose to the chair you sit in.”
Furniture sculpturalist Ashley J MacDonald rests on a stool of her design resembling oversized cigarette butts. CHERYL GORSKI
MacDonald used to work in construction, but started taking art classes in her spare time, where she fell in love with sculpting. Living in an apartment with limited space, she quickly realized her art had to also be functional. After studying interior design and then furniture design, she now combines them all as a furniture sculpturalist.
She melds modern artworks with traditional subject matter, like caring for the land. “I like to make a spectacle out of things people don’t really want to admit,” she says about topics like littering, overconsumption, and isolation.
Sculptures made of ducting, foam, and concrete to resemble oversized cigarette butts are a response to people leaving cigarette butts on the beach, while serving as stools or side tables. “I thought if we’re not going to call this out as a problem, I’m just going to make giant ones, and then you can’t ignore them,” she says.
Her Modlux Cabinet, part sculpture and part storage, is a commentary on overconsumption. With its higher-than-expected stature, it’s presented like a jewel, and its jagged exterior references the quilting of a designer bag, MacDonald explains. Its four legs look like teak at first glance, but are made from African Mahogany, a more affordable and sustainable option than teak.
In the spring, MacDonald launched WABUZ, a line of furniture-adjacent works inspired by the nostalgia of ′90s cartoon and comic book culture. “Wabuz is a play on an Indigenous word for bunny, which is often used in stories to teach children certain morals, so it’s got a very childish, sort of playful nature to it.”
Originally published by the Globe and Mail