Trash was also a cue for Toogood, 45. Watching her children play with scrap materials in her studio inspired her to reconsider the models that she often discarded. Toogood has always made small prototypes: doll-size garments for her line of clothing, and quick mock-ups in cardboard and tape for furniture, including for her famous Roly Poly chair, with an ice cream scoop-like seat and elephantine legs that she first released in 2014. But in 2020, she began to appreciate the miniatures themselves for retaining an impulsive, gestural vulnerability she felt had been sapped from her work. “I liken making them to how the Surrealists did their automatic drawings,” she says. “It allowed their subconscious to come to the surface.” That September, she showed many of the almost 300 maquettes she’d produced that year, even for pieces she never realized, as part of her 2020 collection, Assemblage 6, alongside full-scale versions copied, with unusual precision, from some of the prototypes.
Tangelder, 35, started showing miniatures at a similar point in her career. Last year, after partnering with the Italian furniture manufacturer Cassina, she wanted to work on something spontaneous. Maquettes could be made without a metal shop or considering the needs of a customer, who might not enjoy stretching out on a hard lacquered mahogany daybed shaped like an open book perched on four crates — one of the works she showed in miniature at Valerie Traan Gallery in Antwerp this fall. Crafting tiny pieces by hand fulfilled a need, she says, for “the primitive.”
To Barroso, 27, producing scaled-down models of his irreverent limited-edition and one-of-a-kind furniture is a way to reach a wider audience. “I can’t even afford the stuff I make,” says the designer, who graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2019. He’s trying to bring the price of his Nickelodeon-inspired Green Slime chair down from $2,500 for the original to $250 for a small 3-D-printed version, and refers to the tiny, oozy chairs as toys or collectibles, hoping the approach will appeal to people who don’t consider themselves furniture buffs. “As soon as something has function, it becomes design, not art,” he says. “This isn’t about design. The chair was already solved. This is about art and acknowledging our own human redundancies and ridiculousness.”
Which raises the question: Why make furniture at all if it has no use? For Belloir, the answer, beyond the simple satisfaction of the exercise, is the same as it was for the Egyptians: that these tiny models, even while empty, have the power of effigies, alluding to the presence of former sitters, or invoking sitters who may never come. “The chairs have personality, character,” she says. “They’re like little friends.”
Set design by Victoria Petro-Conroy
