The Artist Crafting Fantastical Headpieces From Watches, Seashells and Stuffed Animals

“Wearable art” is a label applied with some abandon in the fashion world, but there’s no other way to describe the creative director Eric Tobua’s astonishing, often skyscraping headpieces. The Bangkok-based 39-year-old’s wild constructions have included a crown of snake and pig bones; a hat made from a stuffed-animal skunk; and a 2018 piece he calls “Hungry for Love, Hungry for Everything,” a headdress from which dangle plastic and resin replicas of bubble tea, ice cream and mango sticky rice. His massive helmet of fake luxury handbags and jewelry — titled “We Buy Things We Don’t Need With Money We Don’t Have to Impress People We Don’t Like” (2020) — is, he says, a commentary on consumerism and waste, topics he has also addressed with a series of fast-decomposing masks, one made of durian (a notoriously pungent fruit native to Southeast Asia) and another from okra and bitter gourd.

A native of Khon Kaen, a northeastern province of Thailand, Tobua studied ballet as an undergraduate before moving to London to enroll in the art and design program at Central Saint Martins. After earning his degree, he was a stylist’s assistant in Bangkok, where one of his first assignments was to craft runway accessories for a local fashion show. His creations — in particular a sprawling, spiky headpiece reminiscent of a lionfish and made from plastic straws, ostrich feathers and scraps of leather — led to commissions from musicians and television shows, including the Thai version of “The Masked Singer.”

Today, his clients are mostly international: To celebrate the opening of a show by the Spanish painter Miquel Barceló, the Fondation Beyeler museum, outside of Basel, Switzerland, hosted a gala for which Tobua’s friend the Paris-based Thai chef Rose Chalalai Singh created the menu and Tobua made hundreds of seashell-adorned crowns and hats topped with papier-mâché fish for guests to wear, many with collected objects found along the beaches of Majorca, where Barceló was born. Like Barceló, Tobua often turns to marine life for artistic inspiration. His fantasy project, he says, would be “an artistic message sent from the ocean.” One idea: an underwater sculpture that would evolve into a marine habitat. Says Tobua, “I dream of coral reefs growing upon my work.” — John Wogan

Roberto Lugo was a 25-year-old community-college student when he first sat down at a pottery wheel. “I took an art class because I didn’t want to write a paper,” he says.

As a Puerto Rican kid growing up in northeast Philadelphia, Lugo never dreamed of becoming a potter, much less one whose work is now in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. Today, the artist — who went on to earn a B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute and an M.F.A. from Penn State — makes ceramics that reinterpret classic forms through the lens of hip-hop culture and his own childhood. His hand-painted versions of 18th-century Sèvres porcelain vases, English teapots and ancient Greek urns combine traditional decorative motifs with portraits of figures like Stacey Abrams, the Notorious B.I.G. and Cornel West — “people of color who don’t usually end up on porcelain,” he says. Among his best-known work is “Digable Underground,” a stoneware urn embellished with graffiti and renderings of Harriet Tubman and Erykah Badu, now in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The 41-year-old Lugo, who has a new show at the Cincinnati Art Museum (where it is on view through September), is preparing for his first solo presentation in New York with R & Company in August, while teaching ceramics at Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University and making “everyday” pots and cups, as he calls them, which he sells at villagepotter215.com.

A few years ago Lugo made himself a T-shirt that reads, “Pottery saved my life.” He wears it all the time but not — as one might assume — ironically. “I’m from the ghetto,” he says. “I never forget how I could have easily ended up on a different path.” — Catherine Hong

The story of high jewelry in Europe is often said to have originated more than 100 years ago, when family-run ateliers began opening on Paris’s Place Vendôme. But Laurence Graff, the London-based founder and chairman of Graff, has always reveled in a counternarrative. Now 84, he still celebrates his start as a scrappy East End teen in the mid-1950s, repairing Victorian baubles while planning to become an international diamond entrepreneur — having the stones mined, and then polishing, designing and selling the finished pieces. As his boutiques proliferated, he bought up many of the world’s best-known rough diamonds, including the honey-colored 299-carat Golden Empress and the 1,109-carat Lesedi La Rona — at the time, the largest discovered in over a century — and cut them into exquisite gems. Such showstoppers serve as enduring inspiration for the house’s audacious style, epitomized by these new earrings: each a nearly three-inch tower of giant Colombian emeralds — 26 carats in all — capped by a flamboyant trio of pear-shaped diamonds cut to catch even the softest evening light. Graff emerald-and-diamond earrings, price on request, graff.com. — Nancy Hass

Photo assistant: TJ Elias. Set designer’s assistant: Steven Ruggiero

In Bath, England, just off the Royal Crescent — the spectacular semicircle of 18th-century terrace houses familiar to fans of Jane Austen film adaptations — stands an imposing Palladian-style townhouse built from the region’s distinctive golden-tinged ashlar stone. The ground floor of the building, which dates back to the 1760s, has been home for the past four years to the Bath outpost of 8 Holland Street, the London gallery and design store. Starting next month, for the first time, the upstairs residence will be open for private stays. Accessed via an Ionic pedimented porch, the four-story interior includes a drawing room with an oversize Venetian window and Regency stone fireplace; a Shakeresque Plain English kitchen filled with colorful ceramics; and three bedrooms, one with its own roll-top bath and dressing room. Inspired by the homes of collectors like Peggy Guggenheim and Jim Ede, 8 Holland Street’s owner, Tobias Vernon, has filled the place with an array of 20th-century European and Scandinavian furniture, modern crafts and artworks ranging from midcentury St. Ives School paintings to contemporary pieces by David Shrigley. And with current-day collectors in mind, all of it — including the Guillerme et Chambron dining table, the Paolo Buffa rocking chair and the Märta Måås-Fjetterström wall hanging — is for sale. Prices from about $3,900 for three nights, 8hollandstreet.com. — Aimee Farrell

Another Thing: Hun Chung Lee’s Pillowy Ceramic Stools

The art world has never quite known what to make of ceramics. Is a glazed object less consequential than a Classical plaster bust? Can a vase intended to hold dahlias compare to an oil painting? Hun Chung Lee, 56, who splits his time between studios in Los Angeles and Seoul, where he was born, further complicates how pottery is regarded. Over 30 years, using a hand-built kiln, he has sculpted a collection of craggy, one-of-a-kind furnishings: chairs, desks, tables and this most recent grouping of pillowy stools. By applying layers of radiant celadon glazes over a period of days in a process inspired by a technique first formulated in the 15th century, he builds a complex internal all-clay armature for each hollow piece. Whatever category these works belong in — art, design or something else entirely — their monumental beauty endures. Price on request, r-and-company.com. — Nancy Hass

Photo assistant: Maeve FitzHoward