Thank you ! 🙏 💛 •
@disegnojournal “They’ve got a fixed gaze,” Jack Mama says, describing how he often locks eyes with the iron castings he and Nina Tolstrup, his partner and cofounder of
@studiomama , created. “I think that’s what propelled us to do quite a few, because it does have an impact when you’ve got a crowd or a family of them.”
In Disegno #39,
@helenbr0wn explores Studiomama’s projects which toy with the human tendency to perceive specific images in random or ambiguous patterns. While some researchers hypothesise that this evolutionary phenomenon, otherwise known as pareidolia, derives from a survival technique, Mama and Tolstrup have repeatedly taken advantage of it to create charming and delightful objects.
“One day in the workshop we emptied the bin and started playing, and you could see a nose or an eye,” Mama says, remembering the start of their project Off-cuts, a series of creatures made from leftover wood that began in 2010. After publishing Stone Animals, a book of zoomorphic pebbles Mama and Tolstrup picked up along the Kent coast, the pair were inspired to lean even more into abstraction. Based on doodles Mama scrawled during meetings, each face casting is made up of fewer than ten lines, yet still possesses an alert curiosity.
By playing on the brain’s tendency to ascribe human-like qualities to the world around us, Studiomama’s work brings the viewer back to childhood, a time when many of us believed in magic. “With this level of abstraction, you just give a part of something, and then people make up the rest,” Mama says.
The full story is now on our website. Click the link in our bio to learn more.
Images:
@white_sea 
