Meet The Maker: Vezzini & Chen

News | 8 February 202419 March 2024

Congratulations on your recent award. Please tell us about your approach to this project and what you felt made it as special as it was. 

Thank you so much! And a big thank you to Boat International for this award and for shining a light on art and craft. 

The brief from Winch Design was to create a wall installation for a superyacht’s staircase with lights inspired by a range of surfaces related to water, the ocean and the seabed. This was the perfect brief for us – being divers ourselves, the sea and the underwater world with their varying textures and micro-details are among our main sources of inspiration. For this project, we were particularly inspired by the water, waves and refraction of natural light, as well as the seabed and how the sand is moved by the water, creating magical “sand waves”.

Using our signature materials, ceramic and glass, we designed a sculptural lighting wall installation titled, Water and Sand.  Water is represented by clear glass forms. Each glass was then hand carved with a variety of textures inspired by the Ocean. Sand is represented by white hand carved porcelain pieces. Each piece was hand carved with texture inspired by the seabed.  

Light plays a central role within the work, drawing on our experience of diving, seeing the refraction of light underwater and its reflections on coral and marine life. The Underwater world constantly intrigues us. It gives us a sense of peace and calm, which we then try to convey with our work.

Please tell us about your journey into the world of design and craft, and the perspective you bring to it.

Cristina: My love for design and art began at an early age and was initially cultivated thanks to my parents. Since I was little, they have taken me to visit museums and several cultural sites and cities around Italy. Italy is renowned for its high-quality craftsmanship and designs, and growing up surrounded by this has influenced my work. I went to a fine art secondary school, studying both paintings and sculpture. This is where I first encountered ceramics, in particular terracotta. During these years I would visit Milan Design Week and I remember spending hours looking at design shows, especially lighting pieces. It is here that my passion for design started. I think what fascinates me about light is the atmosphere it creates in a space – something that touches your heart, like craft does. I liked the idea of creating a piece which works lit as a light but also unlit as a sculpture, a concept that I began working on during MA studies in Ceramic and Glass at the Royal College of Art. It is here that I met Stan.

Stan’s relationship with glass began solely in books. His father is an enthusiastic photographer and his mum loves discovering food and culture. Together they travelled the world bringing home souvenirs from all over the word.  He began visiting exhibitions and museums during high school and cultivated his fascination for the Western world. His first encounter with glass was in College in Taichung, which led to work experience at the Tittot museum of glass in Taipei. Thanks to his parents’ open minds he was lucky enough to be supported to come to study glass in the UK and begin his journey with his craft. 

Moving to the UK helped us both reflect on our own individual cultures and realise how they affect our practice and our way of seeing things. The highly textured, decorated ceramic forms lead on from the Italian classical style. The partly-textured pure glass forms are a take on Chinese ink paintings. It is a fine balance between the textured part and the non-textured part. The empty space is as important, like in Chinese ink paintings, says Stan.

What do you enjoy about the materials you work with? Are there others you would like to explore?

Glass and ceramics represent who we are, our culture and our interests. Both materials have a strong heritage within our culture and are part of our history. We often joke about the fact that Stan, Taiwanese, is the glassblower of the duo and I, Italian, am the ceramicist, but we both have a profound fascination for both materials. 

Glass and ceramics also have a direct connection to our sources of inspiration, nature and the sea. After all, ceramic and glass are natural materials and use natural elements such as water and fire to be formed. The marriage of the materials and their use in our work is, for us, also a link to the past. Using these ancient materials to create contemporary works makes us feel connected to the long history of our crafts.  

Last but not least, these are the materials we love and feel we can express our art with. Their malleable, translucent, pure and transparent qualities give us the ability to express our art and convey the feelings we want to express within our works. We would also like to explore marble and wood, maybe combining them with ceramic and glass. They are also both natural materials and, especially marble, share a lot of quality with ceramic and glass.

How do new ideas emerge for you and what is the process for developing them into finished pieces?

The motivation to create art comes from our love for the materials, the process and the experience of creating something with our hands, as well as the amazing feeling of embellishing the interior of people’s homes.  The process of how we develop a project is a continuous dialogue between the materials and ourselves as well as a balance between the simplicity in the glass work – Stan’s glass work and his aesthetic – with the highly decorative line in Cristina’s ceramic and her aesthetic. 

The shapes we develop are led by the materials themselves. When making a glass piece, We let gravitation and air to guide us. Gravity pulls the work and forms the shape. During the making process, each piece grows and evolves in its own unique way.  In a similar way in ceramic, we use and exalt the quality of porcelain, its purity, malleability and translucent quality. Once the shapes have been finalised, we work on the texture. Carving is one of our favourite parts of the making process. A form completely smooth without texture feels naked to us and hand carving it feels like dressing up the shape. 

It always surprises us when we put ceramic and glass together. The conversation between the two materials never stops. We often find interesting new reflections from the ceramic on the glass or intriguing distortions by looking through the glass itself. Our work comes alive when we add light, and everything starts to sing. Lights add another dimension to the work, creating new form, textures and reflections – unique each time. Light is an important element within the work. We use ceramics and glass to filter the light and create a warm atmosphere in the space. 

Our external inspiration comes from the energy of nature. When we travel to different countries we are fascinated by the different species of plants and seeds we can find. I, Cristina, have been collecting seeds and pine cones for over 20 years. This collection never stops inspiring us with the different forms they have on the outside and their intricate textures on the inside. The Idea of growth and its connection to seeds and light is what most of our works are about. A seed is a symbol of life and growth – most seeds need light to grow. A bit like our work needs light to come “alive”.

Could you tell us about what you are working on at the moment?

At the moment we are working on two big projects, one for a fragrance showroom opening in London in this spring and a series of wall pieces for a house in the South of France, as well as developing new work for our galleries, Adrian Sassoon in London and Rossana Orlandi in Milan.

Visit Vezzini & Chen here

Follow @vezzinichen

Photography: Sylvain Deleu