From a distance

New Zealand–born, Paris-based design duo Alexandra Batten and Daniel Kamp have once again challenged the idea of functional sculpture with their current solo exhibition, From a Distance, at Carpenters Workshop Gallery Paris. Drawing on field research in Aotearoa and production experiments in Hong Kong and Paris, the show unites 3D-printed aluminium, rough-cut marble and scented volcanic stones to explore memory, place and ecological futures. Hot on its heels is the much-anticipated Titan-Mercury launch – part of their Titan seating series – which debuted earlier this year. And now? As they prepare to expand their practice with upcoming international gallery shows and high-profile collaborations, Batten and Kamp continue to fuel conversation around nature, technology and our collective future – and tell us their secrets in this conversation. 

hube: Your path has taken you from New Zealand’s vast natural landscapes to the dynamic urbanity of Hong Kong and now Paris. In what ways have these distinct environments reshaped your design sensibilities and artistic narrative?

Daniel Kamp: The more time I spend in these three places, the more I realise just how disparate they are. They form three global extremes of a triangle spanning East, West and South. The differences between them are endless – big, small, dense; green, beige, neon; slow and history-bound, fast and future-facing; cultured, untouched… the list goes on. These differences can make them seem incompatible, but we’re starting to find a way to operate within the triangle that makes them complementary.

New Zealand values authenticity above all else, Hong Kong values newness, and Paris values sophistication. So New Zealand grounds us in reality, Hong Kong gives us room to experiment, and Paris forces us to refine. Our life and our work bounce around in this triangle. It’s an exceptional privilege. Between these three places, we have more than we could reasonably ask for to nourish our practice.

h: Your work consistently blurs the boundaries between functional furniture and sculptural art. How do you reconcile the precision of design with the unpredictability of artistic expression in your practice?

DK: I don’t think we blur boundaries because the boundaries are already blurred. I used to believe that we worked in the space between the two disciplines; now I realise there is no gap, no line – rather, there is a pretty big and conveniently less-explored overlap. Working in that intersection allows us to be simultaneously at the periphery of both fields. It’s the closest we can get to seeing both fields objectively while still being inside them. I didn’t answer the question.

h: You often champion material honesty – showing nuts, bolts and the raw essence of each element. What criteria guide your selection of materials, and how do they reflect your evolving themes of nature, technology and memory

DK: Bolts are beautiful; they can be a source of wonder just like stone. We’re really into the history of the Earth at the moment. It’s fun to think about all that was required for a bolt to end up in one of our pieces: the collision of proto-Earth and Theia, the Hadean eon, the formation of stone, the emergence of life, the evolution of brains, the extinction of dinosaurs and the rise of mammals, the birth of civilisation and mass cooperation, the invention of metal extraction and mathematics, the Industrial Revolution, the global economy, AliExpress. You can see a whole universe in a bolt.

h: With projects that involve hundreds of rendered iterations and countless sketches, how do you decide when an idea has evolved enough to be shared with the world? Is there a particular moment of ‘rightness’ you look for?

DK: Of course, some works only take a day, but most of ours take years – I think it’s the same for most artists. Sometimes you need to go with the initial idea; other times you need to let it evolve. Either way can work, and either way can fail.

We just released Echo, a new series of light sculptures with aluminium branches suspended in light. We’ve actively worked on the project for about two years, but the process began much earlier. The first sketches that you could say belong to that series date from 2020. We have 412 rendered digital iterations (I just checked), each based on a sketch, a found natural branch, a 3D scan, a written paragraph or a conversation.

We iterate like this until – brought on by an exhibition deadline – the intensity of thinking escalates and there’s a small breaking point. There’s this ‘just’ moment, where one of us will say, ‘Oh, why don’t we just…?’ When we hit the ‘just’, it normally means we’ve found a simple expression of something complex and the piece is likely finished.

h: Your Titan collection – featuring the Titan Lounger chairs in finishes like Ice and Ash – merges your love for nature with science-fiction influences. What inspired the choice of materials and textures for these pieces, and how do they convey the collection’s narrative?

DK: Titan is a seating series where we anchor simple manufactured surfaces to rough-cut natural boulders using these kind of gnarled, exoskeletal, laser-sintered stainless-steel fixings. Ice and Ash are the first two loungers we released. They feature recycled acrylic seats, which we scratch by hand to give them texture. We just launched Titan-Mercury, a cast-aluminium version, at our new solo show in Paris with Carpenters Workshop Gallery.

With Titan, we’re aiming for something both familiar and alien – grounding but also future-facing. We want the pieces to feel equally at home on the black sands of a west-coast New Zealand beach or the rocky surface of some distant planet.

h: In the Sex Tape work, you transformed a deeply personal experience into a provocative sculptural object. Can you share the internal dialogue and creative risks involved in translating that intimate narrative into design?

DK: Sex Tape was one of those ‘just’ moments. We were asked to make a piece about sex and had been struggling with bad ideas until Ali said, ‘Fuck it. What if we just sealed our sex tape in glass?’ It was such a simple but powerful idea.

We were interested in the thought that our practice is, in some way, a commodification of our relationship. We felt we were slowly eroding the boundary between our private and public lives through our work. The question was: How far should we go with that? The fastest way to explore it was to dial it up to an extreme and then see how we felt. And the answer was that it didn’t feel good. Now we know where our line is – we know how much of ourselves we want to give.

Sex Tape is one of my favourite works – I love it – but we hated making it. We had ‘film sex’ in our calendar like any other deadline. We ruined our sex life at the time by turning it into work. It was super interesting to eliminate those boundaries as an experiment, but we re-established them immediately afterwards because (who would’ve thought?) some boundaries are good.

h: Your Shelter-to-Ground series marks a deliberate shift from digital processes to hands-on making. How did this project reshape your perspective on materiality and your relationship with the physicality of design?

DK: Shelter-to-Ground began very much as a rejection of the digital. We swapped clicking mice for lifting rocks. It was beautiful to get back to basics and understand how elemental design can be. Moving a stone from one place to another can be designed. It was also about trapping ourselves within a production system that forced us into nature – each time a steel-and-stone piece was ordered, it was literally our job to go to the beach or the mountain to find stones. Eventually, though, playing Sisyphus fucked my back, so now we work with others to help us produce Shelter-to-Ground pieces.

Titan integrates that same grounding quality of raw stone into pieces that also have digitally conceived and fabricated elements. We had to free ourselves from the tyranny of the digital in order to return to it with a more natural perspective.