Seven artists explore territory familiar to jewelers: the allure of combining multiple parts into a whole.

Etienne Meneau maintains a close connection to wine. He calls wine capital Bordeaux home and has long experimented with the production of what he calls Strange Carafes: sculptural glass vessels for serving wine that recall the complex architecture of arteries and veins.

For her aptly titled Labyrinths series, Montreal glass artist Carole Frève reflects on the many maze-like paths we might take with our lives, from relationships to career changes. Rest Area, she says, “is a moment of serenity in the midst of this frenzy – a place to catch your breath.” 

Inspired by research on girih – a mathematically advanced decorative art form in Islamic architecture – CeramiSKIN: Digital Islam is an investigation by Pennsylvania architect David Celento and Colorado ceramic artist Del Harrow into how interlocking clay tiles could provide buildings with visual interest, as well as functional benefits such as climate control. 

With its eye-catching layers of leather and molded plywood, Ruit is a worthy tribute to New York artist Justin Crocker’s loves: tough math problems, as well as heroes such as ’60s op-artist Bridget Riley and architect/visionary Buckminster Fuller. Crocker created the chair, which features two- and three-directional weaving techniques, as his graduate thesis project at Pratt Institute with the aid of algorithmic modeling software. 

As St. Louis jewelry artist Leia Zumbro notes, every culture tells stories about the moon – we are fascinated with discerning its mysterious nature and the strange power it holds over forces ranging from ocean tides to female reproduction. The Many Moons series serves as a meditation on this magic. 

In his open, organic forms, Alain Mailland experiments with the interplay of light and shadow, an object and the space that surrounds it. The French woodworker, a longtime student of bonsai, says he imagined Archipel as a single tree that might serve as an entire fantastical island.