There’s a raw, elemental beauty to the work of Ernst Gamperl, the German wood artist who carves sinuous vessels from discarded oak trees in his remote Bavarian studio. Well established in the worlds of art and design, he is now the recipient of some serious fashion love in the form of the inaugural Loewe Foundation Craft Prize. Gamperl’s “Tree of Life 2” series was selected from close to 4,000 entrants from across 75 countries, whittled down to 26 finalists whose work will form an exhibition that travels from Madrid to New York to Tokyo, landing in London next February.
It’s a display that offers a striking insight into the scope of creative talent in craft — from mending and jewellery-making to embroidery and metalwork. So vigorous was the competition that the jury afforded special mention (and €5,000) to experimental Japanese glassmaker Yoshiaki Kojiro, whose aquatic blue bowl melds copper oxide with glass powder, and Mexican basket-weavers Antonio and Veronica Cornelio, the husband-and-wife duo behind “Tata Curiata”, a woven sun-deity tribute.
Craft skills have been embraced by the fashion world in recent years as the boundaries between art and fashion blur. Today, artists collaborate on designer collections, while fashion brands sponsor art fairs. Increasingly, labels are exploring artisanal craft through clothes — last year, Burberry collaborated with Mayfair store The New Craftsman, inviting the public to view their artisans at work on the collection. And designers are creating artisanal-minded homeware: Jonathan Saunders, creative director at DVF, has a furniture line in the works. In turn, design and craft retailers such as The Garnered showcase handcrafted fashion on an equal footing with ceramics and weaving.
“Ernst is someone with a very unique voice,” says Jonathan Anderson, who has been on a mission to champion craft skills ever since joining the Spanish leather brand as creative director three years ago, and whose Loewe prize marks the culmination of a wider campaign to call attention to the artisanal expertise operating behind the scenes in luxury fashion.
Certainly, for Anderson, the old notion of faceless, mechanised luxury is dead. He believes fashion brands today must be borne out of craftsmanship skills that recognise the value of the human hand. “Craft is our bread and butter at Loewe,” says the 32-year-old designer. “But ultimately I’ll only know I’ve done a good job here when we employ more people — that’s when it really goes back to being cultural.”
Gamperl, a spry 52-year-old, fulfils none of the hipster stereotypes of being an axe-wielding woodsman. Seated in the timber-clad café of COAM, Madrid’s breezily modern architectural school, in the hours following the Loewe award ceremony, he wears designer glasses, a sand-hued blazer and grey pants. His demeanour is relaxed. But if he seems to be taking his €50,000 win in his stride, it’s perhaps down to his adventurous past lives: he started his career on the testosterone-fuelled terrain of motorcycle trial riding. “I’m used to the challenges of professional competitions,” he says. “When I was a sportsman I was always losing. Perhaps it wasn’t the right thing for me,” he says modestly. “So to win is very nice.”
Gamperl stopped racing aged 25, and started his career in carpentry and furniture-making in Karlsebene, close to his current home in the alpine town of Steingaden. But it wasn’t until some years later, when he happened upon a book about Richard Raffan, the English woodturner who popularised the craft during the 1970s, that he hit his stride. “From that moment everything changed,” he explains of finding the source of his now signature style. “I was so moved by his work I immediately started to learn woodturning — self-taught at first. That book was the turning point.”
Today, the ancient art of woodturning — essentially carving wood with hand tools and a lathe that rotates in much the same way as a potter’s wheel — is the essence of Gamperl’s work. His vessels have an organic yet otherworldly feel, as though they’ve been pulled straight from the home of some prehistoric cave-dweller. The quartet that won him the Loewe prize is part of an ongoing “Tree of Life” project that began seven years ago with the discovery of a 300-year-old oak tree that had been uprooted by a Bavarian storm. It’s a mere snapshot of more than 15 works that have, until now, been holed up inside Gamperl’s workshop.
Transformation and sustainability are his prevailing themes. Each sculpture is wrought from rejected and recycled trees that would otherwise have ended up as firewood. “I take all the trees that the industry and other craftspeople don’t like,” he says. “They either have too many branches or are too damaged.”
It’s this metamorphosis that captivated the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize judges. “To save dead timber feels very optimistic,” said Deyan Sudjic, the director of the Design Museum in London, one of the jury members that included architect Patricia Urquiola and W editor-in-chief Stefano Tonchi. “Gamperl manages to make something truly exquisite, which also has a social message. Craft is not primarily about self-expression, it’s about skill, but skill in itself is not enough. You have to be able to work in a way that’s both beautiful and communicates something. In the era of the smartphone we don’t need things any more. Yet these are things that communicate our values and how we measure our lives.”
His observations are certainly true of Gamperl, whose process is as glacial as it is attentive. Hollowing out a single slab of wood to create the interior of the vessels, then drying and finishing them, can take anything up to five months. It’s work that’s shared with his long-time French assistant, Steeves Danguy. But this is not about torturing trees into unnatural forms. “I follow the nature of the wood and let it morph into organic shapes that are grown rather than constructed,” explains Gamperl, who then works on the surface of the containers, hand-etching filigree indentations that look like vinyl grooves, applying clays to colour the surface, until it finds expressive new form. Once dried, these carved lumber sculptures are papery thin and extraordinarily light (during turning their weight drops from 500kg to 5kg).
In a volatile time of technological and political flux, the consistent nature of craft, its ancient techniques, offers sanctuary. Gamperl’s Steingaden studio is housed inside a restored chicken barn in the grounds of the farmhouse that he shares with his wife, fellow furniture maker Ulrike Spengler, and their two children. He grows fruit and vegetables on the land, and has planted more than 1,000 oak trees on the property. He also keeps bees in hollowed-out tree trunks (what else?), and uses their wax on his sculptures. Gamperl, who grew up in nearby Munich, the son of a seamstress and a metalworker, still uses the same custom-made tools his late father forged for him decades ago. “They’re a trade secret,” he says affectionately.
Not that his life has been without sophistication. The Loewe Foundation Craft Prize is not the first time that Gamperl has been championed by fashion. When craft fell out of vogue among art galleries in the late 1990s, he found support from designers including Issey Miyake, who spotted his work in the Conran store in Paris, and hosted a series of highly successful Tokyo exhibitions. “He was one of my most important fans,” says Gamperl. “He loves the mixture of textures and the precise forms in my work. It was a thrilling collaboration.” Miyake still has many of Gamperl’s works in his private collection.
Like Miyake, Anderson has also built a vast personal collection of craftworks, a passion the craft prize has done nothing to dispel. Not only does he have his eye on one of Gamperl’s visceral vessels, he has just dropped more money than he dares to mention at auction on a ceramic vase by British potter Magdalene Odundo. “It’s a dirty obsession,” he beams. “If I spend any more money I’ll be on the street.”
Photographs: Ernst Gamperl; Loewe; Catwalking
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