ILSE CRAWFORD's READERLY ROOMS

This image is from the residential page of Ilse Crawford's design website, Studioilse. If I were a room, this is the room I would be: filled with light and shades of green and books and treasures. And a hammock. Crawford's work and philosophy is featured in the eighth installment of Netflix's new series, Abstract: The Story of Design, the first exposure I've had to this artist whose approach to design inverts the poetic logic of the Old English term for the body, the bānhūs ‎(“the body, the chest, breast”, literally “the bone-house”). Her spaces are meant to imbue the sensual body with well-being, with nourishment. And at the heart of her creative process is her studio's "materials library," a catalog of textiles and stone, skins and colors, where objects are brought in relation to each other. I couldn't help but think of an externalized creative process model that emphasizes curatorial judgement (which requires access) and a facility with stringing words together to form constellations with Calderesque proportions.