Nick Ross is product and furniture designer from Inverness, he has been participating in Making Progress 2011 – a HI-Arts mentoring project for mid career makers as part of the HI-Arts Craft Development programme . Nick’s exhibition ‘Domestic Selections’ opens this weekend at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery and then runs from 4 June – 2 July 2011.

Nick studied product design at Gray’s School of Art before graduating in 2008. After graduating he moved to Holland to work under Tomáš Libertiny in his Rotterdam studio, working on a commission from Design/Miami during Art Basel. He later moved to Sweden to work for the influential design studio Front who are based in Stockholm. Since last year Nick has been teaching on the design course at Gray’s as well as working on a commission to design this year’s Arts & Business awards. After the summer Nick will be moving back to Stockholm to study his masters at the prestigious and world renowned art school Konstfack.

Nick is interested in how products affect us and how we use them in our lives. He says about his work: “At this moment though, I want to create products or concepts which don’t merely solve these issues but discuss what affects they have on us. I want to use designed objects to tell stories about our world and by taking inspiration from areas such as biology, anthropology and future technologies, take the complexities found within these fields and translate them into objects to help us digest these grand themes in a simple and poetic manner. In doing so, I want to create a more focused body of work which merges the fields of critical design, mass produced furniture and home wares, design art, installation and science research to create my own unique angle on the design world where I can offer something new to the industry. Something which I feel the forward thinking teaching at the RCA can help me realise”.

“I wanted to create a project that was fluid, something that could take on its own life and evolve over the course of time. What started out as a way of coming to form has itself evolved into something greater, it takes inspiration from evolution and man’s hand within it but it also proposes a new way of creating concepts for furniture as each piece is allowed to evolve naturally to create similar or polar variants. By starting from a common starting point each piece is created from the ‘wild’ aboriginal chair, my vision of a common ancestor”.

“Unlike the design process nature cannot start from a blank canvas but instead must work with what already exists to try and develop improved variants in what is a constant development process. Nature contains no finished articles but instead is populated with passable ‘work in processes’”.

“Much like the concept of domestic selection these chairs take on new identities through the hand of man and through this process a never-ending variety of forms, colours, materials and functions can be created”.

Nick Ross
Designer
Web: www.nckrss.com
Email: nick@nckrss.com

Links:

• Inverness Museum and Art Gallery
• HI-Arts Craft Development
  

As part of the Making Progress Project film maker Catherine Weir is making a series of films featuring makers from the Highlands and Islands. Catherine has been supported by ScreenHI and HI-Arts Craft Development.

Please see her film here: Making Progress Nick Ross, film by Catherine Weir (June 2011)