Sophie Coryndon

SOPHIE CORYNDON

Sophie Coryndon

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Todd Merrill

Todd Merrill & Associates, Inc. 80 Lafayette Street New York, NY 10013 www.toddmerrillstudio.com Printed in the United States of America Coryndon, Sophie.

Sophie Coryndon / Todd Merrill.

1. artist — monograph.

Catalog Design: Dallas Dunn Photography: Simon Leung

Self published by Lightning Press Totowa, NJ

Todd Merrill Studio For over fifteen years, Todd Merrill Studio has exhibited and purveyed the finest selection of post-war American studio furniture. In 2008, Rizzoli published Merrill’s “Modern Americana: Studio Furniture from High Craft to High Glam”, the first ever authoritative examination of the great studio furniture makers and designers who, from 1940 through the 1990s defined American high style. To celebrate the tenth anniversary, Rizzoli published an expanded edition in 2018, adding 60 pages to his original book. This survey of the period included two additional chapters highlighting the importance of Women Makers and Showrooms.

In 2009, shortly after the initial publication of “Modern Americana”, Merrill launched Studio Contemporary, in an effort to develop and represent the work of an international group of established and emerging contemporary artists. Today, their work is sought after by a wide range of art and design patrons, from collectors and decorators, to curators and museum academics.

While their work may be functional or historically based, each artist brings a fresh perspective and a desire to express more than just decorative influence. With an ever growing range of mediums--from textile to porcelain, to marble and LEDs--their joint curation at Studio Contemporary relies

upon their shared drive to push those materials to their absolute aesthetic limits. The result: dynamic, handmade, and unique pieces that contribute to today’s increasingly relevant “grey space” between art and design.

The gallery has progressively cultivated and established new artists, placing their work into private and public collections which include The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum (New York), The Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), The Museum of Art and Design (New York), The Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), The High Museum of Art (Atlanta), and The Brooklyn Museum (New York), and the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pennsylvania), amongst others.

The gallery exhibits throughout the year at some of the leading art and design fairs in the world. A selection of these includes The Salon Art + Design (New York); Design Miami (Basel, Switzerland and Miami); FOG: Design + Art (San Francisco); the Pavilion of Arts and Design (New York, Paris, Geneva, and London); Collectible (Brussels); Masterpiece (London); Collect (London); Gallery Seoul (Seoul); The International Fine Art & Antiques Dealer Show (New York); Zona MACO (Mexico City); Tajan (Paris); Design Days Dubai (Dubai); Art Wynwood (Miami); Art Toronto (Toronto)

Introduction

By Todd Merrill

Todd Merrill Studio began representing UK artist Sophie Coryndon in 2016. Since then her work has found a large audience with collectors and designers worldwide and has been featured in Elle Décor, Architectural Digest, and Town and Country.

Coryndon combines traditional decorative arts techniques with modern innovation. Material and process driven, she employs multiple disciplines including bronze casting, painting, embroidery, and sculpture to capture elements of the natural world, rooted in historical aesthetics. “Basically, I’m drawn to craftsmanship in any form, especially dying crafts,” says the artist, “But I like to take those things and re-imagine them.”

Inspired by close observation, Coryndon’s work illuminates what is often overlooked. Her enthusiasm for the organic intricacies ever-present in the macrocosm drives her tenacious ambition to transfigure the microscopic into the monumental. This practice of maximalism fosters her desire to, as she states “take things further, make them larger, make them grander, right to the point of lunacy. Insane beauty is what I’m ultimately after.”

Coryndon spent her formative years working alongside her father at the legendary Coryndon Cabinet Makers in

England. Coryndon’s work, inspired by elements of the natural world, is rooted in historical aesthetics. Coryndon especially draws inspiration from the influential the 18th century Neoclassical designer and architect, Robert Adams who was described in his obituary as, “a genius in elegant ornament.” The Adams style incorporated elements of classical Roman design alongside Greek, Byzantine and Baroque styles.

Sophie Coryndon

By Eve Kahn You play a crucial role in artworks made by the British artist Sophie Coryndon, each time you stand before them and wonder. Your imaginings about her meanings and techniques, she says, “are what complete the work.” She does not like to give too much by way of her own explanations, because that would spoil some of your delight. What she most delights in talking about is how she experiments with form and materials, inspired by nature and the history of furniture making.

“I always try to push the boundaries, and see where I can go with it,” she says.

She adapts delicate traditional art forms—spun gold threads, lost-wax castings, gesso layered on glossy bitumen—into largescale objects and reliefs. Her laboriously molded motifs can be based on the floral margin illustrations in medieval manuscripts, curlicues embroidered on church robes, leafy borders of Renaissance tapestries, or buttercups, cowslips and hive-building bees that flourish near her centuries-old rural studio in Sussex. “Beauty, wherever I can find it,” she says.

Her work has been called “the quiet shout,” and she rather likes that description. “The details point the way to the bigger picture, in a sense,” she says. “The quiet part is the perhaps traditionally feminine motifs and techniques. The shout is the scale, and the transforming of the soft and fragile into metal and plaster and expanding it into architecture.”

She cannot remember a time in her childhood when she did not feel like an artist already. “I was always exploring my surroundings and thoughts by drawing and making,” she says. Her father Nicholas is a sculptor turned woodworker and restorer—Coryndon Cabinet Makers is the family business. Her childhood home, in a remote part of southwest England, offered “a very creative atmosphere,” she says. On the bookshelves, old tomes of fairy tales had brilliantly colored illustrations; Sophie remembers her anticipation and surprise whenever she lifted milky tissue paper layers that were bound in to protect the pictures. One collection of nursery rhymes told of a golden hare hidden in the images and also somewhere in the English countryside—she kept seeking that hare, indoors and out, for years. Her family’s basic instructions for her free time can be summed up as “Go outside; read; draw, draw, draw; look, look, look.” She is grateful, she says, “we had none of today’s distractions.”

At her father’s workshop, she marveled at the variations on chairs throughout the centuries. He taught her to carve—wooden lizards were a longtime favorite—and by age 6 she was learning to use chisels and lathes. She brought home some of his finials, sabots and bits of gilding, ornament, inlay, tortoiseshell and shagreen. “My father would say, ‘But what are you going to do with it?’ and my response would always be, ‘I’m going to make something with it.’”

In the 1990s she studied at Swindon College’s art school and Cardiff School of Art & Design. She had originally intended to focus there on painting. But she soon realized, she says, “All the interesting things were happening down in the sculpture department—I was already frustrated with two dimensions.” And she soon found herself wielding welding torches. Right after graduation, she joined the family firm, specializing in color matching for repairs and other fine surface detail. Among her favorite assignments was restoration work on the blazes of birds and flowers in the chinoiserie wallpaper at Badminton House in the Cotswolds. She meanwhile became well known for her floral paintings, which were coveted by celebrities including the interior designer Nina Campbell and the writer and philanthropist Hannah Rothschild.

While embellishing some paintings with gold leaf and lacquer, Sophie kept longing to turn two dimensions into three “or maybe four,” she recalls—meaning she hoped to capture something of the passage of time. By the early 2010s, she was branching out into limewood carved fruit trees that stretched across walls and crocodile skins portrayed in gesso on folding screen panels. She works alongside her artisan husband, Dan Street; the couple has raised two children on their Sussex property, along with a menagerie of chickens, doves and bees.

For inspiration, she sometimes just studies wildflowers near her studio, or analyzes historic cabinetmaking techniques. And she likes to ponder “antiquated words or folklore like old country names for flowers—then I try to reimagine it all for a contemporary audience.” She always asks, why have we always fashioned things that way, what have we forgotten how to do, and why not dare to change?

Why not cast beehives in bronze, to make something practically eternal out of the fragile products of endangered insects? When one layer of gilded flowers in a picture frame seems not quite enough, why not float another layer a few inches in front of it, to create the illusion of a meadow’s depth and cast petaled shadows? And if the renowned 18th-century architect Robert Adam could drape garlands of husks along mirror frames, why not invert those motifs and let them crawl up walls?

On her sculpture surfaces, she says, “There’s no bit that hasn’t been tooled, cast, trimmed, tinted.” The nitty-gritty processes take up entire days. She uses dental tools and needles to produce textures and patterns that draw in the viewer from a distance, and then reward close inspection. She compares herself to honeybees that cannot resist filling every void in their honeycombs.

Every week or so, she sets aside time to dream up her next experiments: “There are golden days, when I get to play with all the fragments and ideas I’ve collected over the years—that’s what I live for.”

Harvest Moon, a large carved wallhanging, explores Corynon’s fascination and inspiration derived from the unicorn tapestries in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Created in the 1500th century, the tapestries known as millefleurs (meaning a thousand flowers) were woven in many different workshops in Northern France and Flanders. They often included small animals and birds among the flowers.

Harvest Moon is adorned with hand-tooled flowers and insects that are cast and gilded before being arranged on a rich brown wood panel in a compley composition, giving the illusion of a floating orb. The individually crafted flowers, leaves and insects are carved to mimic the goldwork embroidery commonly found in church vestments, military costume and wall hangings. The harvest moon, the full moon occurring at the start of fall or the autumnal equinox, is brought to life in the golds and tawny brown of the work.

“I like to take these almost feminine things and make them larger, so they force themselves into your attention by their very size,” Coryndon explains. “They aren’t overlooked anymore or taken for granted.” This is used to full effect with works such as Harvest Moon, Float, and her celebrated Book of Flowers.

Harvest Moon 2019 88H x 86W Inches Jesmonite, 23.5ct gold leaf, wood

St. Peter’s Altar Panel 2019 37H x 72.50W x 2D Inches Jesmonite, 23.5ct gold leaf, wood

A diptych titled Tapetum Lucidum, magnifies the fine patterns and details of a pair of moth wings. Each exaggerated wing scale is cast from a sculpted master mold in carton pierre (a papier-mâché made to imitate stone or bronze) before being independently set with pins to create a fluid, cascading texture. The scales, in rich ochres, bronzes, and golds have been finished with wax and oil to imitate a leather-like material.

Her use of pins to secure each wing scale is a hidden reference to the display method popular in Victorian insect collecting.

Historically, insect collecting became a very popular and widespread hobby in the Victorian age. The usual method of display is in a glass-covered box, with the insects mounted on specially made “insect pins.”

Coryndon’s experiment in pointillism illuminates the overlooked intricacies of the natural world, transfiguring the microscopic into the monumental.

Tapetum Lucidum Diptych 2019 60H x 96W x 5D ininches Carton Pierre, wax, oil

Float 2018 43H x 98 1/2W inches Jesomonite, 23.5ct gold leaf, wood

Dossel, a large-scale wall hanging, is composed of panels of layered, cast Jesmonite honeycomb, which have been embellished with cold enamel resin to simulate honey and then gilded and highly patinated. The overlapping layers of the panels hang gently, emulating luxurious ornate textiles. At once colossal and delicate, Dossel beautifully preserves the fragility of its source material. Dossel is the term for an ornamental cloth suspended behind an altar, often attached to the wall behind. It is sometimes referred to as an alter screen. Dossel is inspired by the Pala d’Oro a golden altarpiece of the treasury of S.Marco, Venice.

Dossel beautifully preserve the fragility of their organic source material. Coryndon became interested in bees after learning about the current global crisis facing the insects. In her efforts to immortalize the abandoned hives that inspire her works, Corydon employs the lost-wax method, an ancient and labor-intensive technique.

Dossel 2018 88H x 86W Inches Jesmonite, 23.5ct gold leaf, wood

The Illuminated Herbarium combines drawing, plants and illuminated manuscripts. It consists of a growing library of cut, gilded, etched and pinned paper flowers that surround Coryndon’s Sussex studio. The works are informed by daily observation of the natural world, a deep love of the countryside and a predisposition to collect.

Echoing illuminated manuscripts and gilded margins - these wild flowers are often found on the roadside verges, ditches or edging the lanes. Coryndon captures each one in needle etched 23.5 ct gold leaf. Pinning it into position as one would a butterfly or pressed flower has become a spring obsession.

Illuminated Herbarium 2019 Concept sketch for a proposed room installation. A fully immersive, paneled room configured from individually framed wildflower specimens. Delicately created from cut and formed paper, each original specimen is needle etched, gilded in 23.5 ct gold leaf, and held in place with brass pins.

The Illuminated Herbarium Triptych is based on the concept for Coryndon’s paneled room configured from individually framed wildflower specimens.

Available as individual pieces or grouped by commission.

Shepherds Purse, Ladies Smock, Knapweed, Clover, Buttercup, Campion, Ragged Robin,Groundsel, Forget-me-not, Chicory, Honesty, Vetch. (12 currently available)

Illuminated Herbarium Triptych 2019 paper, 23.5 ct gold leaf, brass pins 36h x 50w x 1d in // 91.44h x 127w x 2.54d cm

Hoard, Nimbus 2019 29H x 39W x 1D inches jesmonite, 23.5ct gold leaf, resin, wood

Dossel Diptych 2018 86H x 94W Inches Jesmonite, 23.5ct gold leaf, wood

Book of Flowers 2017 72H x 102W Inches Gilded goldwork flowers on a polished ivory gesso background

Both Primavera and Book of Flowers draw inspiration from sixteenth-century tapestries and intricate goldwork embroidery.

The magnificent works are adorned with hand-tooled, gilded flowers not unlike those found scattered throughout the English countryside. In Primavera, the work’s smoked gesso background highlights the three-dimensionality of the delicate flowers. Book of Flowers’ polished ivory gesso background pairs beautifully with the glinting gold leaf gilding, enhancing the work’s bright visual effect.

Primavera 2017 48H x 96W Inches Gilded yellow and white goldwork flowers on gesso background

Sophie Coryndon’s Honeycomb Marriage Mirror takes inspiration from grotto furniture. From the 16th century onward, grottoes were constructed as fanciful retreats from reality. Throughout Europe, these fantasy structures were “adorned with interesting rock formations, fountains, seashells, and often, matching furniture.”

The fashion continued through the Rococo period and into the 19th century. The intricate scrollwork, with C and S-curved designs were based on the sea shells.

Coryndon imagines the carved motifs and scrolls have been built over by bees, using the small spaces between the ornamentation to store honey. It imagines a collaboration where man makes the structure and nature creates the ‘grotto’ or the fantasy element.

Honeycomb Marriage Mirror 2018 18H x 14W Inches each Bronze, 23.5ct Gold leaf, Antique mirror

Honeymoon 2016 24 inches diameter Bronze and cold enamel

Honeymoon, whose layers of cast bronze honeycomb are arranged in a spherical shape, is the first in an ongoing series of works based on eighteenth-century witch balls. The suspended work is lit from within using LED lights, producing a lovely pattern of shadow and light that reflects its unique texture. Honeymoon, which renders the iconic form of a modern disco ball in the organic, ancient material of honeycomb, is a compelling example of Coryndon’s artistic exploration of bees.

Fragment 2018 30H x 45W inches 23.5ct gold leaf, acrylic polymer, on glass

The Hoard Series furthers Coryndon’s exploration of honeycomb.

Using cast bronze, gilded plaster, and precious and semi-precious stones, the work highlights the exquisite nature of its source material. Though bronze is typically regarded as a robust medium, the material assumes a jewelry-like delicacy in Coryndon’s hands.

Hoard Series 2016-2017 16H x 12W Inches Bronze, gold leaf and enamel, semi precious stones

Adam’s Vine 2016 118 x 118 inches Resin, 23 carat gold-leaf and brass

Adams Vine is made up of 1000 cast and gilded husks strung on brass wire and trained up an interior wall in Classical Rococo style.

The composition is versatile. It can be trained up a vertical interior wall, across a ceiling or floor or suspended within a framework to create a division of internal space.

The piece was inspired by the 18th century Neoclassical designer and architect, Robert Adams who was described in his obituary as, ‘a genius in elegant ornament’. The Adams style incorporated elements of classical Roman design alongside Greek, Byzantine and Baroque styles.

Adams Vine is the first in a series of Architectural Vines. The piece is available to commission with variations in scale, husk design and finish.

Mille Fleur Garland 2019 Concept sketch for a proposed installation consisting of a trailing garland of foilage. Delicate, individual leaves and flowers of sculpted clay are mounted over wood, and gilded in 24kt gold leaf. Shown with Honeymoon overhead.

Todd Merrill

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