When nature and design collide
- Anna exhibited at the New York and Milan Design Weeks
- She is inspired by her native landscape and objects found in nature
- She uses a variety of techniques
Born in a village in the Świętokrzyskie Mountains, Anna Bera began working with wood at the age of 14. She learned woodcarving at art school, but craft itself was not her main focus. "Already at that time I was interested in contemporary art and abstraction," she says. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, where she chose stage design, Anna worked for few years in the visual arts and new media. She focused on conceptual photography, which led her to collect all kinds of objects found in nature, especially stones, igniting her creativity to the point that conceptual work was no longer enough to fulfil her. "The ideas and objects on which I focused… I felt their energy; it’s just the medium that was not right."
INTERVIEW
I came up with a project, an object enclosed in the form of a polyhedral rock made of glass. I couldn’t find anyone who would do it for me, so I set up my workshop from scratch and made a collection of wooden objects based on that idea. It is now called Earth Wood Stone.
Everything in my creative process is based on the collision between these two extremes. I was brought up among the beliefs and traditions of the ancient Slavs. My last collection is inspired by rural, primitive techniques, yet giving modern functionality to these objects demands sophisticated skills.
Carving gave me very intimate contact with wood. I think this is the foundation of how I approach the material, but mostly I just learned by myself. Each of my collections is based on a different concept, the use of different tools and materials, and I find pleasure in this.
It depends on the design. Usually at first I am inspired by a specific object taken from nature. Then there is the creation of the whole story. It's a bit like solving a puzzle to understand what attracted me to this item and then trying to translate it into forms. It is a long and constantly evolving process.
1 EXPERIENCE
