The Perfectly Imperfect Vessels of Madeline Coven

The Perfectly Imperfect Vessels of Madeline Coven The Bushwick designer uses animal hides to experiment with form and light. Photo: Frankie Alduino The Bushwick studio where Madeline Coven works is located on the hazy border between Queens and Brooklyn amid a cluster of beef distributors and hydraulic repair shops, gay nightclubs and indoor adventure parks. Her shared studio with a fellow artist is on the fourth floor of a building that’s been partially converted into a high-end members’ club. You enter through the lobby, which is decked out in a suite of vintage furniture, and take the elevator to Coven’s workspace. Noisy with the clatter of street construction, it’s packed floor to ceiling with boxes on one side and on the other with the drill presses and ventilation hoses that are the vernacular of makers. When I visited Coven in her studio last month, she showed me metal-casting tests for an upcoming exhibition in Santa Fe, and our conversation quickly turned to the limits of her design process — in a metaphorical and physical sense. Using images she’d found in the paleontology archives of a New Mexico university, Coven had carved the imprint of two prehistoric fossils into slabs of wood, then cast the resulting voids in aluminum. “I’m always trying to recreate patterns or textures that occur naturally because they’re so unbelievable to me,” says Coven. “But the way they already exist is better than what I could ever make.” In this instance, the hot metal had burned away some of the painstaking detail she’d carved into the wood. Wasn’t that frustrating — even Sisyphean — I asked, to always fall short of an impossible benchmark? “I’m not striving for perfection,” Coven says. That’s a refreshing thing to hear from any creative person. Coming from Coven, it sounds like not only a healthy boundary set by a firmly zillennial artist but also a succinct description of her practice. Before striking out on her own, she spent three years in the studio of furniture designer Minjae Kim. She credits Kim with helping her develop a framework for her studio: “He does so much with so little and makes ideas work even without all the perfect tools and access.” Before that, she studied sculpture in college and then worked as an artist’s assistant in L.A. The metal castings Coven uses in her work, some of which become hardware. Photo: Frankie Alduino Perhaps because she comes from an artistic background rather than one steeped in industrial design, “where you’re figuring out the most functional way to produce something or the best material,” Coven’s studio functions more like a lab, she says. She creates work only after a long period of experimentation, during which she observes the different ways a material can act or react. It’s a habit she may have picked up from her father, an herbalist, who often took Coven on walks along the clearance ditches surrounding her childhood home. “He’d stop and point out every plant and take photos of it, and it would take forever to go on a short walk. But I think that close observation of the world influenced me a lot,” she says. The first piece of design she ever made was in collaboration with another alum from Kim’s studio, Jenna Graziano. Together, the two built a straight-backed seat with a frame made from sand-cast recycled aluminum and a sling made from cowhide. That was three years ago, but nearly everything Coven has made since then has drawn from a similar materials palette with occasional detours into fiberglass and resin. “I like materials that are forgiving, and I like for there to be room for error so unexpected things can happen,” Coven says. From left: The designer wrapping animal hides around metal armature for pieces she will exhibit at Galerie Was. Photo: Frankie AlduinoPhoto: Frankie Alduino From top: The designer wrapping animal hides around metal armature for pieces she will exhibit at Galerie Was. Photo: Frankie AlduinoPhoto: Frankie Al... From top: The designer wrapping animal hides around metal armature for pieces she will exhibit at Galerie Was. Photo: Frankie AlduinoPhoto: Frankie Alduino For the Tribeca gallerist Jacqueline Sullivan, Coven devised a series of sconces made from animal hides with pewter embellishments and later a collection of wall lights with flinty lunar screens made by pouring into a tray sheets of pewter, which is manipulated as it cools. For St Vincents in Antwerp, Coven made a set of mahogany tables edged in cowhide and pinned with squares of pewter that resemble belt buckles. And in November, she’ll debut her next body of work at Galerie Was on the Lower East Side: a series of nonfunctioning vessels made from cow- and goat hide, fastened with pewter hardware. In Coven’s studio, evidence of her experiments with these materials is all around. The windowsill is lined with the seeds and stones she often casts in metal; baking trays are piled high with sculptural, globular metal forms; and a hot plate sits at her workstation waiting to turn tin into malleable goo. Animal hides — which Coven started sourcing years ago from a leather-and-furs shop in her hometown of Albuquerque as an alternative to fiberglass — are draped and wrapped around wooden bases or rolled up in great sheets on the floor like ancient scrolls, their scalloped edges flaring outward. A test for Coven’s upcoming Galerie Was show with pewter hardware. Photo: Frankie Alduino “I’ve mostly been making tests so far,” she says of the vessels bound for Galerie Was, flipping through a sketchbook where she’s drawn sample vases with thick bodies and pursed lips. She’s also been researching the history of canteens, which were often made from animal hides and sealed with beeswax to retain water. In her tests, Coven first soaks the hides in water, then wraps them around a welded steel frame to dry, observing as the material expands and contracts. It was my first time seeing a cowhide at such close range, and while it does bear a distinct resemblance to fiberglass, the material never lets you forget where it came from. When a hide is rolled out in its entirety, you notice follicles or darker patches where perhaps the animal once held more fat. Draped onto metal frames, the hides create folds that appear like skin or, occasionally, spun candy. “There’s something very alive about it,” Coven says. “It has a mind of its own. I’ve had finished pieces even warp a bit over time, which shows how it’s still living and changing.” Her use of animal skin brings up another philosophical query: What are the consequences of using a once-living thing in your work? (One unintended one: When the tables were being installed at St Vincents earlier this year, a dog kept sniffing the pieces. “I was like, Oh right, this is a chew toy.”) “There’s an eeriness to it, for sure,” Coven says of the material. “I mean, it’s dead, and that feels heavy. But I’m not trying to ignore that weightiness.” Perhaps these are the kinds of questions every designer wrestles with at the beginning of their practice: Who am I? What are the ramifications and rewards for what I’m making? Is there any ethical way to put things out into the world as a designer? The difference is at a tender age, Coven is willing to grapple with these issues aloud. The results are thoughtful, considered, and compulsively great. 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