Playing With Trash
Madeline Isakson is building her own weird and wonderful world using once-forgotten objects.
Madeline Isakson is a self-described furniture maker, artist, designer, tinkerer, and garbage-enthusiast. Her works, which include a chair made out of hair, a puzzle made out of cold cuts, and a series of styrofoam objects that were recently exhibited at ICFF, are just the right amount of wacky, weird, and imaginative.
Seeing her work has personally resurfaced all of my childhood urges to play with my food – see mom, this is what I could have been making — and I’m so glad I got a chance to sit down and speak with her more about it.
So, how did you get into furniture making?
I actually thought I was going to be an actress for a long time when I was a kid. I switched schools for it and from 6th to 12th grade I went to a performing arts school. I quickly found out I can’t sing or dance or act. But I stayed through high school and was able to be around a bunch of supportive creative people. I started doing some set and prop stuff and that came way more naturally to me than the actual acting side. I also started taking design and woodworking classes at a community college — I learned there that you could go to school for furniture design, from the guy who taught the class. I found an undergrad program that offered it, and the rest, as they say, is history.
If you had to imagine your furniture being a part of a TV show or film universe, what would it be?
Definitely some bureaucratic dystopian sci fi — Brazil maybe, I think they describe it as flights of fantasy and the nightmares of reality. Like a world where everything looks familiar but is slightly off.
Ok, so I have to ask, what about hair spoke “chair” to you? Well, actually, that rhymes so it makes some sense, but you’ve made stuff from cold cuts, fast food, and old clothes as well. What does your process look like for making those connections?
The hair chair was one that I made a long time ago. It was one of the first pieces I made that broke out of my traditional woodworking furniture thing. And it opened the door to this other world where function could be subverted and things didn’t have to make sense. Hair is a powerful material because when it's connected to your body, there's a vain-ness associated with it, but as soon as it's disconnected it's disgusting. The chair is aesthetically pleasing from a distance, but as you get closer and realize it’s human hair, you likely pause and question whether you want to actually sit in it.
I have always been drawn to materials and objects that most people would consider gross or trash out of context, like wet deli meats or old clothes or used cardboard. I'm attempting to re-contextualize it into a world where someone would want to buy it or feels an emotional connection to it, and it's transformed into an object of desire.
You must have played with your food as a kid, right? I don't know why I feel like I want to know more about your childhood because you must have had a crazy imagination. How do you still cultivate that today?
I am definitely an outlier in my family and the token artist. I went through a multi-year phase of only wearing cowboy boots and tutus. And I think some of my childhood experience is referenced through a lot of the materials I'm drawn to … a suburban middle-America quality: the sliced deli meat, or the Styrofoam packaging, the tchotchke stuff that I do. It makes me think of Chili's or the Rainforest Cafe and the mall I grew up going to.
I think the work I'm making is still connected to my childhood and that these objects are living in this universe I'm creating — that's often based on nostalgia. It's not just a totally made-up universe: there’s a cultural memory that we all share through these materials. That’s why I think people are attracted to them — they are somehow familiar.
And these are other people’s hair and other people’s items that you’re using in your work, right? Other people’s childhood memories? It could be their third place figure skating trophy from elementary school that you’re making a chair from.
Totally. I'm collecting other people's nostalgia, but that they didn't want anymore. I develop an emotional attachment to — I don't know — these souvenirs and packaging materials that someone else threw away. But it's funny when you're going through the thrift store because you'll find the same exact figurine or playmate cooler, but with someone else's initials on the bottom.
I think it's so interesting to think of the memories that we put on these mass produced plastic objects. And then we discard them, and now they're just a plastic object again. I think it shows the coldness of the designs.
You must have gotten this before, but I'm surprised that Lady Gaga hasn't hit you up for an encore to her meat dress. Is there any person you think it’d be super cool to collaborate with?
I feel like I daydream about this stuff all the time but now I’m drawing a blank. Maybe Nathan Fielder? I think we could design something off the wall together.
I’m also inspired by hyper niche industrial processes. Like I would love to go to a hot dog factory or collaborate with a marble making company. There are such amazing crazy tools and machinery out there that would be really fun to misuse.
We might have to do a Pink Essay field trip to a hot dog factory [laughs].