CCCXXXIX by Karl Monies

Karl Monies’ foray into stoneware manifests through a range of vessels: a series of decorative lidded containers, jars, and pots adorned externally by multi-coloured climbing rope and finished with oversized cork lids. A trained painter and part-time fine jewellery designer, Monies is somewhat of a stranger to utilitarian design objects, which he approaches with the naïveté of an amateur, a humble student. His ongoing Arcana series, embraces design thinking only to interrogate it and undermine it from within, resulting in a line of aesthetically compelling, esoterically symbolic, and deeply humane objects that seem both ancient and hyper-contemporary, silly and sublime.

Of all design objects, the vessel is perhaps the most universal and timeless, a typology that has manifested in every culture since the dawn of humanity. Simply due to its age, this utilitarian object—intended for storage, protection, and preservation of goods—finds itself overloaded with mythological and symbolic meaning. Pre-Christian European fertility cults rendered their female gods as ritualistic vessels, while the Ancient Greek used vases as pictorial spaces for storytelling and history writing. In the Tarot, the 14th Arcana is Temperance, depicted as an androgynous angel pouring water between two vessels, symbolizing spiritual balance, restraint, moderation. Ranging from petite to oversize, Monies’ own vessels cite these ancient styles in both shape and form, but mixes them with a handful of others: African tribal design, high-modernist lifestyle objects, and 70s home pottery all converge, leading to a kind of timeless typology: all and none at the same time.

However, nothing escapes the zeitgeist of the contemporary, and Monies’ vessels, too, display an acute awareness of the stylistic currents of their time. In the past five years, stoneware has become all the rage, particularly in Scandinavia, signalling a shift from the purity of postmodern sleekness and a re-discovery of the hand-made, the clunky, and quotidian. To this pristine aesthetic he adds multi-coloured climbing rope, a futuristic and high-tech material used for suspending bodies and objects, here repurposed as unlikely but effectively contrasting embellishment. The result is a surprisingly stylish, indeed fashionable object. Style, of course, bears its own ritualistic value, particularly at the intersection of contemporary design and art where Monies’ practice delicately balances.