Pennsylvania-based design firm Unform Studio launched The Drip Collection at Alcova Miami during Miami Design Week. Blending the contrasting forms of industrial metal and the organic chaos of pooling paint, the Drip Collection is meant to bring Miami’s colors to life as furniture.
Informed by early American Mahantango Valley painted furniture—and built in the same Pennsylvania valleys—the Drip Collection takes paint as its basis, but rather than using it as applied decoration, makes paint its entire form.
The Drip Collection explores the idea of improvisation in furniture design—the melding together of random, organic forms with industrial production processes and materials. Taking inspiration from post-war American art in movements like abstract expressionism, where artists such as Helen Frankenthaler experimented with relinquishing some control to the material and medium at hand, the Drip Collection similarly allows the randomness of the paint to fuel and structure the form.
Inspired by Frankenthaler’s soak stain method, which allowed paint to soak into the canvas and create its own structure through pooling, energetic shapes, each side of the Drip Collection takes its form from a paint pool pattern.