FIRMAVERA is the artistic practice of Natalia Romanova, based in London. Her product design ethos stems from her soviet childhood’s constructivist heritage and her experience as an industrial designer. She is influenced by an appreciative knowledge of engineering and industrial processes as well as the radical honesty of utilitarian and brutalism architecture. 

The unpretentious beauty found in these disciplines informs her artistic practice which expands into experimentation through shape and perception. The frequent use of ceramics is a suitable canvas to convey a truthfulness to material while elevating the functional aesthetic into objects that are celebrations of that raw utopian vision. 

Exposed overstructures, pattern repetitions and modularity hint at mass-production techniques and a brutalist rejection of ornaments. Ethical and functional intentions incidentally become malleable materials. The objects of FIRMAVERA are therefore playing with the notion of form and function, reconsidering their relationship in order to question the traditional norm of beauty.

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