New Folk

I'm sure I'm not the only one who noticed recent design trends turning more and more often towards folklore and native craftsmanship traditions. We all begin to honour the beauty of folk patterns, embroidery and handmade lace from all over the world. Traditional craft is a box full of trasure!

New Folk furniture collection designed by Anna Stępkowska is one of the first signs of awakening fascination with polish cultural heritage. Not only the form of individual furniture pieces but also all the decorative elements were inspired by motifs from polish regional craft.

The collection was accompanied by unique art project: a photography series "Borders". Both authors, a photographer Piotr Sikora and an artist Piotr Bondarczyk live and work in New York. And both, of course, are Polish. The idea was conceived by multi-talented Piotr Bondarczyk, a painter, graphic designer, photographer, actor and stylist. The series tell a story about opening Polish society, once closed and homogeneous, now growing from cross-cultural interaction. Beautifully photographed by Piotr Sikora, the intriguing portraits of foreigners in national Polish folk costumes symbolize the unity between the past and the future.

Surreal interiors by Anne Hardy

The photographs taken by Anne Hardy are strangely captivating... I felt entirely drawn into the images that seem to invite us into mysterious, intimate worlds. Each of them enclose a different, personal story. The artist says:

"I want you to encounter the spaces directly and not through someone else physical presence in the image. However I also don't see it that there is nobody in the images, the protagonists are embedded into the spaces by the way in which they have used, marked, adapted or built them. So even though they are not physically present they still possess the space."

The interiors are not real, but created by the artist herself. Photography, as a documentary medium, helps to evoke the viewers imagination and transfers us into the child-like state of mind, into the time that reality was magical and everything was possible.

"The relationship between the real and the fictional is important to the work, not literaly (is it real or not?) but in relation to what we consider or imagine our actual 'real' world to be."

via: Trendland, Zoum Zoum

interior design photography by Tim James

Nicely captured atmosphere, great light... what else can you wish for?
photos by: Tim James

Human Clock

Human Clock, photography by Romain Laurent