Julian Mayor

 

Image: Impression chair by Julian Mayor. Photo: Stephen Brayne.

 

Julian Mayor’s chairs are a bold interpretation of the interface between human and technological visual forms; a theme which dominates his design and artistic work.

Julian’s design philosophy has grown out of a desire to sample the recurring structural elements within organic shapes. He draws attention to the simplicity and geometry within nature, challenging our visual associations of what is regular and irregular. Beauty emerges where the order and pattern of these structures and straight lines is shown to meet their organic curves.

Crucially, his neat philosophy translates well into beautiful, practical products. Contour and Impression are sophisticated in concept and accomplished in realisation.

With Impression, Julian devised a chair that carves the recess a human shape occupies out of a 3D grid, creating a realisation of a graphic model. Like the earlier Contour chair, it was created from the map of a person’s seat that was then digitised and sectioned on a computer.

“The way a computer sees is so imprinted into our visual acceptance of things that I created a chair that would look in reality as it would on a screen,” says Julian.

Both chairs exist as furniture and sculpture. The steel Contour chair is made by hand, while the birch plywood Impression chair is routed by CAD.

Contour was originally commissioned for the outdoor sculpture park at Goodwood, but it works equally as furniture for interiors. Julian is currently reapplying these principles to a new chair design with a faceted surface, made from fibreglass.

Since gaining his MA from the Royal College of Art in 2000, Julian has built up an extensive portfolio while working for design companies, including two years as a product and interior designer for IDEO in the USA. Since returning to the UK, he worked for Pentagram on two gallery interiors for Goodwood, due to open soon in Percy Street, London. He recently submitted his own design for a £40,000 skate park project in Scotland, and he is currently working on a project with Tom Dixon.

His strength as a designer lies in his approach that is based equally in design and art. Personal skies, a project undertaken with Naoto Fukasawa of IDEO, Tokyo, explored the nomadic concept of hot-desking in office spaces. Exhibited at Workspheres exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2000, the project sought to explore the function of imaging technology to personalise our working space, adding a sense of ownership to a temporary environment.

Several artistic works pursue similar ideas. In Like Rain, Julian arranged vertically suspended strands of wool in a room-sized grid structure, an artificial recreation of a natural process.

This beautifully simple concept was repeated in Digitiser, where Julian assembled a grid of LEDs, activated by the wind, to recreate the experience of moonlight reflecting on the surface of water.

“I want to experiment with how artificial something needs to be before it is perceived as real,” Julian says. “I always think: how would a computer see that? My work is often based on sampling an experience and recreating it artificially.”

 

September 2003