LMAKbooks+design is excited to present the group show The Green Life featuring the works by Simone Bodmer Turner, Simone Frazier, Kora Monigle, Yuko Nishikawa, Maryam Turkey and Lydia Xynogala. Perfectly timed with the upcoming Spring season, this exhibition celebrates the resurgence of life. Through various mediums like ceramics, concrete and greenery the artists and designers explore time and existence transforming the gallery into a flourishing environment of objects and foliage.

Simone Bodmer Turner is inspired by the longstanding clay techniques that many communities throughout the world used long before her. She explores the merging of sculpture, architecture, and function by embracing the idiosyncrasies that emerge through the process of building by hand, and has created a series of pieces based on the same original form, but morphing into their individual expression though partnership with the human hand. Her poetic relationship with this earthborn matter is evident in the shapes her works take as vessels and vases. She pays homage to the role that clay has played throughout history.

Simone Frazier is an artist, designer, and founder of garden design collaborative Open Source Landscape. Her relationship with landscape and plant life is motivated by the redemptive and holistic aspect inherent to growing plants, and is working towards expanding a socially conscious network of artist / gardeners and patrons in New York City. For the exhibition she will create a site-specific installation of greenery.

Kora Monigle is a designer, interested in creating functional sculpture. Her design work combines passion for color and unexpected details, with Scandinavian undertones inspired by her Danish heritage. In the exhibition, she will present her Couplings planters, which are inspired by the materiality and geometry, found in Brutalist architecture and basic forms found in small-scale machinery hardware. The hard lines derived form the textural surfaces, and the heaviness of the concrete are meant to compliment the softness and lightness of any chosen flora or plant. The planters can be stacked and mixed and matched.

Yuko Nishikawa is a designer and ceramic artist, specializing in lighting, installation, sculpture, vessels and tableware. She will present for this exhibition You See a Sheep, a lighting collection that uses hand-built ceramic shells to house the light source and thin metal wire to make the shells appear to be floating in space. A mysterious yet warm glow is revealed through the holes against the dry paper-like surface. The arrangement, the colors, and the numbers are all determined considering the layout and the volume of the space the piece occupies. She will also present her latest series of ceramic works which is inspired by the idea that plants grow from a seed, become a tree and bear fruits with long periods in between that we don’t notice. These changes are everywhere; they are mysterious and wonderful and resemble our memory and how our minds work. In this new body of work, the artist wants to explore these undefined periods and express a hopeful view towards a change.

Maryam Turkey is a designer, who is currently pursuing her design residency at the Museum of Art and Design as part of her studio practice. Her focus is on experimenting with materials and processes to develop unexpected, unique moments with functional objects. In this exhibition she will present Mazamla a contemporary water cooler inspired by traditional Middle Eastern water coolers that were made of Terracotta. Her goal was to bring back this traditional technique and re-design it to fit our contemporary world and as a reminder that humans are inevitably intertwined with nature; water, earth, plants. No matter how much we improve our synthetic technologies, it is important to be able to interact with other living things.

Lydia Xynogala is an architect and educator. She directs ALÓS, a practice for Architecture, Landscapes, Objects and Stories. In her work she explores relations between sites, material properties and cultural narratives at various scales. They are articulated in buildings, experiments and writings. In this exhibition she will present Return of La Belle Jardiniere (Homage to Women). Objects that are part landscape, part female body and part architecture. They are cast from sand, concrete, pigment, and metallic powders and a homage to Max Ernst’ The Return of La Belle Jardiniere (1967). Throughout the history of art, garden imagery has alluded to the female gardener, the “jardinière”. Jardiniere as a symbol follows a long iconographical tradition of Madonna as fertile or enclosed garden or objectified in a vessel carrying plants.