Working as an accessory and fashion designer for 20 years, I have cultivated a unique sensibility about the good and beautiful. Through my work with Isaac Reina and Jean Paul Gaultier and finally in my own studio, Schmitt et Pinet, I have drawn together connections, references, and techniques that are complex, diverse, global, and gesturing towards the unrestricted.
In my studio practice, working in a crafts tradition forged by Jean Michel Frank, I use straw marquetry, a medium situated across decorative, design, and pictorial disciplines. Loaded with silica, Rhye straw contains extraordinary qualities of luminosity and reflection, giving it an almost uncanny quality of artifice. With its novel relationship to time, tradition, and precision, marquetry engages forms and concepts through a warm naturalism.
In my studio practice, working in a crafts tradition forged by Jean Michel Frank, I use straw marquetry, a medium situated across decorative, design, and pictorial disciplines. Loaded with silica, Rhye straw contains extraordinary qualities of luminosity and reflection, giving it an almost uncanny quality of artifice. With its novel relationship to time, tradition, and precision, marquetry engages forms and concepts through a warm naturalism.
