December 13, 2024

Spotlight on new design talent at IDS Vancouver

Spotlight on new design talent at IDS Vancouver

Three designers tell us about their work and big plans for the future

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The Interior Design Show(IDS) Vancouver runs from Sept. 21 to 24 at the Vancouver Convention Centre. It’s a great place to check out new and up-and-coming design talent alongside established brands.

The Prototype exhibit is about shining a light on emerging designers, even if they’re not selling commercially yet.

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Postmedia sat down with three designers participating in Prototype to hear about their work and big plans for the future.

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Daisy Kim

Daisy Kim, a recent design graduate, says everything she’s made up until now has been about experimentation — not commercially motivated.

The series Kim is exhibiting at IDS is called Goanoori. Born and raised in Vancouver, she has a Korean background and says her last memories of Korea are of her grandmother’s house in Busan, South Korea. These memories inspired her Goanoori collection.

“The word ‘Goanoori’ focuses on the notion of centrality, to maintain your centre wherever one finds themselves in the world. It reminds me to stay grounded in who I am and what I do, and I can only hope it sends the same message to others,” she says.

Goanoori series by Daisy Kim.
Goanoori series by Daisy Kim. Photo by IDS Vancouver

Kim says her design practice has been a vessel that allows her to reconnect with her cultural heritage and carry “the weight of tradition.”

She wants to create spaces that are filled with a sense of joy:

“I centre on the emotion of ‘laon,’ meaning joy in Korean, and the ‘nanoom,’ the sharing of that pleasure,” she says. “My design practice helped me touch base with my background as well as keep me grounded with my cultural duality.”

Adrian Heim

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Adrian Heim launched Heim Furniture in spring of 2022 while completing a fine-furniture program at Camosun College.

“I design and build solid wood furniture one project at a time in a small workshop in Victoria’s Rock Bay neighbourhood,” he says.

Heim grew up on a farm in South-Eastern Quebec and began making things with wood as a teenager. He had access to some tools and a basic understanding of how to use them from watching his father. Heim built his first bed and side table while in high school.

Reading chair by Heim Furniture.
Reading chair by Heim Furniture. Photo by IDS Vancouver

Heim completed a bachelor of fine arts at the University of Victoria, thinking he’d go on to study architecture, but found what he really loved doing was making furniture people could use.

Heim says he initially heard about the Prototype exhibition from people who had taken part.

“I submitted an application with my lounge chair, which is a flagship product of mine, and I was lucky enough to have been invited to show it this year,” he says.

Li Ting Wang

Li Ting Wang is a ceramics artist based in Vancouver. She graduated from Emily Carr in 2021.

Most of her work is installations and sculptures, and she focuses on the “unity of negative spaces in ceramics and sculpture.”

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“Early in the practice, I combined clay and wood to explore the relationships between internal and external and reconstruct their coherence in the forms,” says Wang. “After I graduated from university, I started practicing the skills for making functional ware and continued integrating the idea into the form of daily use objects like mugs and vases.”

Wang says she got an invite to apply for Prototype through one of the show curators finding her work on Instagram.

“After I saw his message, I applied without any hesitation,” she says.

Check out the full IDS lineup

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