![]() She chats with visitors known and new, all the while curating the brand’s offerings and iterating on her own contributions. Just around the corner, on Red Hook’s burgeoning Van Brunt Street, an assortment of furniture pieces, decor objects, and fine jewelry are displayed in the Piscina storefront. Pottery wheels whir in the light-filled ceramic studio. Saws buzz on the communal woodworking floor. On any given day, Piscina’s 7,000-square-foot workshop teems with artists and designers plying their trade. “That was the basis of Piscina-a place where we can pool our knowledge and expand our practices,” Shook says. A Hurricane Sandy-ravaged warehouse in Red Hook ticked all the boxes, including proximity to the water, which was important to the partners–even before the idea of a rising tide lifting all boats became central to the studio’s ethos. When they outgrew it, she and her co-founder sister, Cal, went searching for a long-term home. So Shook decided to build her own maker space inside a Williamsburg loft where a fledgling creative community could share equipment and explore new media. And the question then becomes, ‘How do I make this given work?'” “I start by establishing something that I don’t intend to change and then build on that. “That’s kind of how I approach my work,” she says. Years of Shook riding up and down those elevators left an impression: confidence in one idea is enough, even when others can’t see it. Nevertheless, for visionary architect-founder Peter Cooper it was inevitable that cities would grow vertically. It was also the first in the world constructed with an elevator shaft even though Elisha Otis’s passenger elevator was still years away. ![]() The five-story Italianate brownstone the University calls home was New York’s first skyscraper and, at its opening, the tallest in Manhattan. Equipment, resources, and know-how would be key to her making the most of it.Ĭooper Union’s Foundation building taught her that having space, literal or figurative, in which to solve a problem can be as important as the solution itself. Years of surrounding herself with diverse creatives had broadened her palette. With that shift came a realization: despite committing herself to the practice every day since she was fourteen, she was no longer just a painter. To have the collection percolating and seeing it so well-received was so affirming.” ![]() “I needed to build a space where I could explore new media. “Moving from painting into the applied arts was a big shift,” Shook says. She won Best New Designer and, for good measure, Best in Show. Headlined by a showstopping oak shelving unit and rounded out by ceramic and cast-iron pieces, it launched to considerable acclaim at 2022’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair. A taste of the polymathic led her to launch Piscina, a design studio and collective in Red Hook, Brooklyn showcasing the talents of woodworkers, ceramicists, and metalsmiths.Īll, appropriately, feature in her debut collection. Born and bred in the midwest, the Cuban-American artist moved to New York to study painting at the famed Cooper Union but quickly discovered an affinity for carpentry and fabrication. Talking with Natalie Shook, you get the feeling that she’s actually many people trying to be one person. ![]()
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