photograph by Ori Harpaz
Designing Women III: MOTHER is a curatorial collaboration between design studio Egg Collective (Stephanie Beamer, Crystal Ellis, and Hillary Petrie) and artist Tealia Ellis Ritter. Designing Women III: MOTHER builds upon Egg Collective's previous exhibitions, Designing Women (2017) and Designing Women II: Masters, Mavericks, and Mavens (2018), all of which have sought to foster a dialogue about women in the applied and fine arts.
Egg Collective is a New York-based design firm established in 2011 by Stephanie Beamer, Crystal Ellis, and Hillary Petrie. Before Egg Collective was a company, it was an idea. Conceived of as a creative partnership synthesizing its founder’s backgrounds in art, architecture, and woodworking, this notion evolved into an ethos: Materials are sacred and are imbued with infinite potential. The act of creation carries responsibility. Beauty has value, not merely for reasons of aesthetic gratification, but because the essential character of any object is defined by the circumstances of its creation.
Each item in Egg Collective’s Collection is handmade from natural materials that are intended to stand the test of time. That inherent solidity extends to every aspect of the company’s production processes. Community, quality, and stewardship of the natural world are at the company’s core. All of Egg Collective’s work is made of the highest quality raw materials in its own woodshop and in collaboration with local small-scale fabricators.
In addition to its commitment to high-quality craftsmanship, Egg Collective’s work is united by an underlying attention to detail, surface, and form. The company’s sculptural designs combine elemental shapes with materials that patina and age beautifully including: wood, leather, metal, glass, and stone.
Egg Collective also represents a small selection of emerging and mid-career contemporary artists and designers with the intention of creating a dialogue between the applied arts and the fine arts.
Tealia Ellis Ritter is an American artist living and working in rural Connecticut. Ellis Ritter's work contends with the intersecting roles of the photograph as personal document, familial marker of time and object with physical surface. Her interests lie in exploring, in a physical and emotional sense, the act of looking and being looked at in return, coupled with the desire to understand the changing nature of intimacy over time. She is presently engaged in a long term project documenting family members in both a representational and abstract manner, with a focus on the physicality and vulnerability of the human body. Ellis Ritter utilizes multiple modes of image production, typically in the traditional black and white darkroom, including experimental approaches to printing, as a way of physically engaging with the work and bringing her own body movements into the photographic process.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently by Aperture, The Magenta Foundation, Taschen NYC, Double V Gallery, France, Catherine Edelman Gallery and the Swab Art Fair Barcelona. Her work has also appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Youthies Magazine, Public Editions, Mouvement Magazine, France, Stella Magazine, Bloomberg Pursuits Magazine, Paper Journal, Ain’t Bad, Musee Magazine, C 41, FotoRoom, The Financial Times of London and The Heavy Collective.