Restaurants
It is inevitable, if you make sculptures from cutlery, that sooner or later a restaurant or hotel will come knocking, looking for a slice of sculpture action. There have been quite a few requests, but not many pass muster, being the fussy miss that I am.
When André Balazs approached me to make a bouquet from spoons for the Chiltern Firehouse it was a definite yes. The restaurant interior was designed by the wonderful Paris based Studio KO with all the lightness of touch, wit and irreverence of an Oscar Wilde play. From the restaurant’s finest silverware I created a bouquet of wild, elegant and beautiful specimens – not unlike the clientele of what was to become the most talked about hotel, bar and playground in London.
Similarly, when the swanky Swiss ski resort of Gstaad opened its first new hotel in a hundred years, The Alpini, I was more than happy to revisit my cutlery drawer. This time I pulled out the knives – thousands of them. The planned art works, I felt, should have a meaningful connection to both the mountain location and the Michelin starred restaurant where they would eventually hang.
Enter Gstaad’s famous mountain goats. Known for their majestic horns – some curly like giant cork screws (Toggenburg), others like elongated whelk shells complete with spectacular ridges and valleys (Oberhasli) – they were a sight to behold.
With a gentle nod to that Alpine folk tradition of mounting horns on shields, over several months I contorted every manner of knife into five pairs of alpine goat horns. The sculptures create an aesthetically complete circle, having explored the essence of mundane cutlery and expanding them into their spear-like predatory associations.
Restaurants and Hotel commissions: Waldorf Astoria New York; Waldorf Astoria Dubai; W Hotel, Hoboken; The Alpini, Gstaad; The Londoner Macau; The Chiltern Firehouse, London, Les Grands Buffets; Narbonne, The Dorchester; London, The Great Scotland Yard Hotel, London.
