ELLEN PONG MAKES THE CASE FOR CERAMIC FURNITURE

Ellen Pong makes ceramic furniture, which she says is a bit unusual for good reason — the pieces end up being quite heavy. “I just felt like I had to make these things that I’d been thinking of, and that was the most accessible material to me,” Pong says. The Seattle-born artist’s early works are playful, like her Massage Stool, which is covered in small nodes that knead your glutes, and many of her works take on the jagged natural forms found in the Pacific Northwest. With her Lost and Found stool, a recent commission for the Brooklyn Museum, she fossilized small objects that might get lost or hidden underneath a table — a lighter, buttons, gum — within the wood itself. Her designs for Intrusive Thoughts, a collaboration between Superhouse and Hem, takes the form of two sculptural mirrors — Duck and Boot — that “explore the imaginary lives of mundane objects.” The former is inspired by the way duck families cross the street in single-file lines, and the latter by the way little kids’ shoes end up strewn across floors during playdates. With the Untitled vitrine lamp she recently made for a show at USM, she created an eerily green blown-glass sculpture from a ceramic mold, setting it within the modular furniture brand’s iconic hardware. She describes the process as an exploration of mold-making as translation, which she continued with the vase she made for Design Miami last year; Pong pressed the clay into a plywood mold before firing it, unglazed, in a wood-fire kiln for 24 hours a day for one week, after which it cooled for another. “All of the debris and ash that circles throughout the kiln settles randomly on the pieces. The whole process transforms the original design into something you would have never thought in the beginning,” she says. “It’s like a game of telephone — it’s out of your control. It’s a process of letting go.”