“I always wanted to figure out how a material functions in space. “I try to approach things with curiosity,” she tells Business of Home. To her designs, Rower brings pluck and a fresh perspective, crafting top-notch products with a freewheeling attitude. Rower may be young, but she’s definitely not wanting for street cred. “I had the ability to fire in my mom’s kiln in her backyard, and I just started selling stuff I made on my website.” “With the state of the world, I I was just going to make some functional stuff to get back into making things,” she says. Fortunately, Rower’s artist mother had invested in a backyard kiln some years earlier, so Rower had a creative outlet waiting in the wings. Back in Brooklyn, she instead spent the time in lockdown creating molds and prototyping new pieces. When COVID lockdowns sent RISD students home, Rower’s ambitions for her thesis project-a ceramic furniture collection-fell by the wayside. Courtesy of Isabel Rower | Right: This porcelain seat cleverly transforms into a chair and ottoman set. Left: Rower’s ‘The Sky Contained My Garden Chair’ features Swarovski glass crystals embedded into its ceramic body. So I went out there and worked with Kanye on the whole concept, which ended up being these soft furniture sculptures.” Unbeknownst to Rower at the time, the first piece she’d made for the family would go on to be published in Architectural Digest in February 2020, mere months before her graduation. “He’d been hired by Kanye West to work on some ideas and asked me to come out to Calabasas and do some design work for. He requested a commission that was anything but run-of-the-mill for a college undergraduate: “ had seen my work and reached out to me,” she says. I was like, ‘Wow, these people know how to work in all of these mediums-they can weld metal, machine wood, do hand-building and play with really unconventional materials.’ It was motivating to feel like I could learn how to make pretty much anything.” After that, Rower spent her college summers interning for furniture artists like London-based Max Lamb and Brooklyn-based Thomas Barger.Įarly in the summer of 2019, Rower was contacted by Paul Johnson of Queens, New York–based Johnson Trading Gallery. “The furniture show was so superior to anything that I had seen in other shows,” says Rower. From there, she went all in on the arts after all, attending a furniture design department showcase her freshman year that left her awestruck. When it came time to apply to colleges, though, Rower did apply to a single art school-the Rhode Island School of Design. “Obviously, we all want to rebel against our parents, right?” she says. From the outside, it’s no surprise that she landed in the fast lane to a design career, but Rower never expected to end up as an artist herself. Rower grew up in Brooklyn, with two artists for parents, attending an arts high school and painting in her father’s studio.
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