Synnøve Frederick
Synnøve is a sensory designer, artist and maker.
Creating installations, sets and furniture that communicate emotion, orientation and story through the senses. Trained as a designer and furniture maker she uses a wide knowledge of sustainable materials, plants, light and sound to create tactile and welcoming spaces.
Her artistic works Look through craft and landscape to explore belonging and connection. She has researched palaeolithic processes, from fire by friction and green wood work to leather tanning, to uncover the origins of how we consume and design. These techniques reveal our most basic requirements to feel at home and guide the objects she produces.
She values collaboration, creating new works with directors, dancers, gardeners and schools.
Showing at spaces from the South Bank Centre in London and Tribeca Film Festival New York, to domestic homes, food markets and gardens internationally and for local benefit.
Works
Salmon Skin Umbrella
840mm x 700mm x 700mm.
12 British salmon skins, tanned with Suffolk & Somerset Willow bark tea made with bark from a tree over 30 years old, Cotton thread, 1960’s umbrella frame from Somerset and Buckskin trim.
It holds a relationship between us and the landscape, selecting and creating a material that guards us from exposure to the outside world. Protecting from the migratory, genetic and circumstantial landscapes; British rain or the Indian sun.
The umbrella is one object as part of a group of objects looking at the nature of skin and belonging.
Mistakes tables
1100mm x 350mm x 550mm
These tables look at what is attractive in human error. When it’s not 90 degrees, or you’ve cut something to short and you need to find a way to fix it and find a more beautiful solution. Exploring what’s makes a bespoke object over something mass produced.
Smoke Tables
Various Sizes
The history of fire by friction held in a long winded Rube-goldberg machine taking us back through the ages and giving us smoke.
Fire by friction takes skill, listening, will, respect and knowledge. The cogs that drove it also needed patience to understand and the motor that drove that needed many people’s skill and consistency to drive the cog that wound the cord that drilled the stick. This piece is built of many prototypes and experiments and pays homage to the history of tools
Edge of things
As part of a continued exploration of ‘skin’, where we begin and end, the Newlyn Art Gallery was transformed into a compartmentalised set. Sand from the public Cornish coast line was wheeled into the private rooms of the Gallery. Brooms were distributed and people were invited to remake the borders, or ignore the sand. To play and see where the edge of things were.