Marc Fish Press

Marc Fish's work has been published online and in print Worldwide. Here is just a sample of his press coverage. Contact - marcfish.com

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Biophilia

Nature Reimagined May 5, 2024 – August 11, 2024

Biophilia: Nature Reimagined brings together more than 80 imaginative works, including architectural models and photographs, objects, fashion, digital installations, and immersive art experiences that collectively highlight the transformative power of nature.

Biophilia | Denver Art Museum

Biophilia: Nature Reimagined brings together more than 80 imaginative works, including architectural models and photographs, objects, fashio

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Marc Fish. British, born 1971, active in Newhaven, England

Ethereal Double Console, 2022 Sycamore veneers and resin 39⅜ × 110¼ × 15¾ in. (100 × 280 × 40 cm) Courtesy of Sarah Myerscough Gallery. © Marc Fish. Photograph by James Florio, courtesy of the Denver Art Museum. Cat. 15

See further details on the next post.

*Biophilia: Nature Reimagined* brings together more than seventy imaginative works, including architectural models and photographs, objects,

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Marc Fish was delighted to have a console table in Biophilia: Nature Reimagined, at Denver Art Museum.

Organised by Darrin Alfred, Curator of Architecture and Design at the Denver Art Museum, Biophilia: Nature Reimagined explores the transformative role that contemporary architects, artists, and designers play in reexamining and reanimating our intrinsic bond with nature.

Use the search facility, top right, to find Marc's console table and more information.

*Biophilia: Nature Reimagined* brings together more than seventy imaginative works, including architectural models and photographs, objects,

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Made from sycamore and resin in a very organic sculptural form. Elegant and sinuous the piece shows real grace but also an unequivocal energ

Ethereal Drinks Cabinet. With wall mounted bar / console

Made from sycamore and resin in a very organic sculptural form. Elegant and sinuous the piece shows real grace but also an unequivocal energy. The Ethereal series utilises unique techniques developed solely in Marc Fish's Studio in the UK. His work can be found in private homes in all corners of the globe - the Ethereal series sits well with more traditional furniture or contemporary modern pieces. The Ethereal series is the epitome of innovation from the studio that has become popular among collectors.

The Ethereal furniture is made from Marc's usual laminated veneers, with the important difference that he leaves negative space between them – treating them not as layers within a solid stratigraphy, but as fins within a more open structure. He then pours resin over these delicate, paper-thin armatures. The use of frosting and tinting in the resin produces mesmerizing visual effects, like sunlight through water currents or tree canopies. The principle of visual movement, which has been central to Marc's work for years, is quite literally transformed into another dimension. Having drawn his line and followed it this far, he is now moving beyond, exploring the more elusive and evanescent movements of space itself. 

The skills of a craftsman: Perserverance

The Ethereal drinks cabinet doors glide sideways to reveal laminated shelves holding glasses and bottles, each shelf peeling away from the centre upright. The back panel's grain follows the form of this feature and the pattern continues outwards towards the open doors. This single design feature contains 2000 pieces of hand-cut veneer. 

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Collections - Silver Jubilee Exhibition

25th Birthday Party of Sarah Myerscough Gallery

23 June - 21 October 34 North Row, Mayfair, London. UK

To mark Sarah Myerscough Gallery's Silver Jubilee, a very special group show featuring the legendary artist-designer-makers that made it all possible.

As part of Collections we are pleased to present a new body of work from Marc Fish, the debut piece of his new Kasumi-Uchi collection.

Kasumi-Uchi, meaning cloud or mist metal is made from 3 different lacquers - bronze, aluminium and black - each a thin layer applied on top of the last and built up, many hours of labour then goes into revealing the curling pattern of their combination.

Marc Fish says - "The Kasumi-uchi finish was a natural progression from our wildly popular Mokumi-Gane pieces. We have a long history of innovation, experimentation and progression here and we have been working with applied metal finishes for the last 8 - 10 years. Mokumi-Gane meaning ‘wood grain metal’ was a combination of this work and period in the studio’s history, but ever forging forward we wanted to explore a metal finish with three different colour layers. Kasumi-uchi is the result, the literal meaning is ‘cloud or mist metal’ and I think this is very fitting to the new finish."

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Marc Fish, furniture designer, UK made the cover of Australian Wood Review, issue March 2023. Australian Wood Review is Australia’s premier woodworking and woodcraft magazine. Step-by-step projects and articles on technique for all skill levels offer up to date knowledge on designing, joining, carving, turning, decorating and finishing wood. Our stories are authored by Australian master craftspeople and wood artists. Each issue includes reviews of all the essential hand and power tools and machinery, specialist fittings and products that woodworkers need to successfully complete projects. Australian Wood Review also profiles local and international makers, giving an insight into their working methods. Australian Wood Review is a magazine for all woodworkers and people who love wood.

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Marc Fish and Sarah Myerscough in Design District Magazine

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Cover Artist: Marc Fish

Marc made the front cover of New York luxury guide Passport! View the magazine and read more of Marc’s article... “Marc Fish has long been fascinated with the natural world. Whether by conceiving new materials or rewriting old methods, he is uniquely fuelled by the ambition to bend a material to his will to achieve his ultimate vision.”

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Marc Fish at Design Miami, Florida 2020.

Read Architectural Digest’s coverage of the show here; https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/at-design-miami-nature-and-nurture-reign-supreme

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Everything You Missed at This Year’s Design Miami

Despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, a mixed virtual and in-person Florida fair marches on

At Design Miami, Nature and Nurture Reign Supreme

Marc Fish featured in Architectural Digest’s coverage of Design Miami in Florida last December 2020.

Despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, a mixed virtual and in-person Florida fair marched on. By Nick Remsen. December 3, 2020

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Ethereal Lounge Chair

Constantly striving to transcend the barriers of art, design, sculpture and furniture, this iconic piece by Marc Fish really does stand in a class of its own.

 Marc Fish’s ‘Ethereal Series’ was born out of an exploration to develop new, innovative techniques for combining resin with his signature wood laminations. Marc has created a revolutionary material that allows light to pass through poured and carved resin. Reflecting off the paper-thin wood veneers, the light takes on different shades, manipulated by the spaces between the laminations. The effect is that of a constantly shifting, illuminated surface quality.

Ever inspired by the elements of the natural world, Marc’s ‘Ethereal Series’ mimics the delicacy of the leaf structures. In an exploration to design new, innovative techniques, he has pushed the limits of 21st century furniture design.

Marc is also the Founder and Principal of ‘robinson house studio’ furniture school, which has recently moved into a sustainable state-of-the-art unit in Newhaven, on the picturesque south coast of England. ‘robinson house studio’ offers the unique chance for students to be taught furniture making and design by one of the world’s most eminent designer-makers, together with Senior Tutor Theo Cook, who is known in the woodworking world for his amazing Japanese dovetails. All of which makes this educational establishment a very unique place with students flocking from all around the globe to be taught by these talented craftsmen, who are both passionate about passing on their knowledge to the next generation of furniture makers.

Tegan Foley.

http://marcfish.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/WoodworkerGoodWoodworking-MarcFish-EtherealLoungeChair.pdf

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Marc appeared in the Financial Times on September 20th 2019. The piece covered his design ethos and ambitions prior to showing with Todd Merrill at PAD London.

Marc Fish is one of several ambitious makers whose furniture aims to excite.

You can read the article here on Todd Merrill’s site - https://toddmerrillstudio.com/financial-times-september-21-2019/ or if you happen to be an FT member the article can be found here: Designer Marc Fish on making furniture that excites and haunts

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The Design Edit

In the Newhaven studio of furniture-maker Marc Fish, Claudia Barbieri discovers how the designer bends wood to his will.

17th September 2019

ONE MIDNIGHT IN July, the SushiSamba restaurant at 110 Bishopsgate, high above London’s financial district, closed earlier than usual and a team of workmen moved in. Taking infinite care they manoeuvred three intriguing objects, made from around 5,000 wood shavings layered and interleaved with resin, into the service lift that whisked them to the 39th floor of the building formerly known as Heron Tower. There, working against the clock with chronometric coordination, installers, electricians and riggers assembled the objects into a 2.5-metre-wide, light-emitting, revolving conch.

“We had to make the pieces the right size to fit through a metre-wide lift door – there was just 15 millimetres clearance,” says the designer Marc Fish. “At 4 o’clock in the morning it was finally being winched into place, just as the sun was rising behind it.” SushiSamba’s marine mollusc is pure Fish: organic form; technical complexity; extreme precision and creative innovation. “It was quite a special night for us. The restaurant opened at 10 am the next morning all cleaned up, almost as if we hadn’t been there – except there was a large shell hanging from the ceiling,” says Fish.

In the past ten years Fish, now 48, has emerged as a rising star of art furniture, with clients from as far afield as Hollywood queuing for up to two years for his creations – and international students flocking to learn his methods at the Robinson House Studio Furniture School. What attracts clients, students and design mavens is a particular fusion of traditional and high-tech craft skills, daring aesthetics and experimental materials science.

Marc Fish with ‘Sycamore Seed Sculpture’, 2019 COURTESY: Marc Fish / PHOTOGRAPHER: Simon Eldon

Despite his global status he still operates from Newhaven, a nondescript south coast port near Brighton with a tradition of furniture-making, where he first set up a studio cum workshop 22 years ago. Now, in an unpretentious single-storey backstreet shed, up to fifteen would-be cabinet makers at a time learn traditional woodworking skills under the eye of master craftsman Theo Cook (Fish’s partner in the school, and a pupil of the 20th century British and American masters Edward Barnsley and James Krenov).

In the main workshop next door, three makers on a recent day are working on a mirrored pair of ‘Ethereal’ console tables – as well as a surreal seven-foot high armchair that Salvador Dali could have conceived for Game of Thrones. In his studio Fish lays swatches of ink from a broad -tipped pen onto a sheet of paper: calligraphic doodles that may germinate into an exotic new species of Fish furniture, or end in the waste bin.

Marc Fish working on ‘Adhesion console’ 2017 COURTESY: Marc Fish / PHOTOGRAPHER: Simon Eldon

Furniture has function and Fish takes care to tick that box. An ‘Ethereal’ console table may swirl and curve but it’s flat enough at its centre to hold a phone or a lamp; a ‘Babel’ drinks cabinet may look like a man-sized caterpillar’s cocoon but, hinged open, it displays bottles and glasses. Still, what fires his imagination is form. “It’s nice to make sculpture, and not to have practical limitations forced on you,” he says. “Often you come up with a form and then you think, ‘How do I make it into a table?’ Almost as an afterthought, you put a glass top on it. I don’t want to go down that route anymore. The reality is, a lot of what we do is sculpture.”

Marc Fish, ‘Mokumi-Gani’ console, 2019 COURTESY: Marc Fish / PHOTOGRAPHER: Simon Eldon

Marc Fish, ‘Mokumi-Gani’ console, 2019 (detail) COURTESY: Marc Fish / PHOTOGRAPHER: Simon Eldon

While his reputation has soared these past few years, his career path has been anything but linear: in fact it has been almost as sinuous as his signature style. Aged 14 he wanted to be an architect, but he left school at 16 and went to work in a bank for the next seven years. As a hobby, he started restoring vintage Porsche and Volkswagen cars – one of his restored VW campers was bought by the company for its museum in Germany. Then he turned his self-taught metalworking skills to making metal furniture.

For a couple of years he did well. “In 1998/99 we were selling work through three shops in Brighton,” he remembers. “Then those three shops all went bust in three months. Taste suddenly changed. Metal furniture died a death, it was considered cold and sterile. Everybody in Brighton was getting into heavy, chunky dark timber furniture from Indonesia. Suddenly there were no more orders. It was pretty dire.”

By then, the design bug was in his blood. Rather than dwell on the setback, he went with the flow and switched into wood. After studying for a City and Guilds furniture-making qualification, he trained for six months under the cabinetmaker John Lloyd in Ditchling – spiritual home of Eric Gill and the Sussex Arts and Crafts movement.

Marc Fish with ‘Vortex’ dining table, 2018 COURTESY: Marc Fish / PHOTOGRAPHER: Simon Eldon

As his materials evolved, so did techniques and styles. The early metal furniture was, “more Bauhaus, more 1920s, art deco but a little bit contemporary.” After learning to work with wood he spent several years making traditional joinery pieces. Then, in 2009, “I woke up one morning and thought, ‘Why am I doing this? I don’t like what I’m making. There’s no creative outlet’,” Fish remembered. So he decided to change direction.

He set up his school to earn a living from teaching the skills he’d learnt, and in parallel started experimenting with supple wood veneers. Bent into shape, stacked sequentially together, suspended in and bonded together with resin glues, the flexible slivers of wood lent themselves to naturalistic shapes. “I just fell into my design identity,” he says.

Marc Fish, ‘Ethereal Desk’, 2018 COURTESY: Marc Fish / PHOTOGRAPHER: Simon Eldon

His first ‘Nautilus’ edition of tables, like the ‘SushiSamba luminaire’, was inspired by the Fibonacci spiral of a seashell. His ‘Ethereal’ range of desks and chairs draws on the lacy translucency of a skeletal leaf. Perhaps oddly, his own taste lies elsewhere. His favourite designer, he says, is the 1930s French modernist architect Pierre Chareau, a visionary pioneer of the use of mechanical engineering and heterogeneous materials. “I would like his aesthetic in my own home,” Fish says. As for his own work: “I design furniture for a different market. I am not my own market.”

Though his style may bring to mind the voluptuous ripples of Art Nouveau and the fluid idiom of his Irish contemporary Joseph Walsh, Fish denies consanguinity with either. Art Nouveau he dismisses as “almost treacly”, and asked for historical role models he looks no further back than the last century, pointing to the pioneering work of John Makepeace and Wendell Castle.

Marc Fish, ‘Laminaria chaise’, 2015 COURTESY: Marc Fish / PHOTOGRAPHER: Simon Eldon

Walsh he respects; but for all the similarities of conceptual idiom, he says they inhabit different technical worlds. Where Walsh crafts his willowy structures from saw-cut 2-millimetre veneers, Fish works only with thousands of knife-pared veneers, each no more than 0.6 millimetres thick. The thinness of the wood allows it to be bent like paper, without steaming. It’s a technique that he says allows a purer aesthetic. But it is also extraordinarily time-consuming, technically challenging and costly. The ‘Nautilus’ table was built from a stack of 4,000 veneers and took a thousand hours to make.

Marc Fish, ‘Nautilus’ coffee table, 2014 COURTESY: Marc Fish / PHOTOGRAPHER: Simon Eldon

The translucent resins too, binding the veneers together into batches, are the end-product of a painstaking process of trial-and-error and materials-science research. “We’ve had five resins that we’ve used in the past four years,” Fish says, “We’ve experimented absolutely to death. We’ve had a nightmare journey!” A big challenge is the way the resins react with the wood: to speed up production, the liquid resins are heated to harden faster, but in this curing process exothermic reactions happen that can suck air out of the wood and form bubbles in the resin. Flawed batches go into the bin. “It’s taken us three years to get the technique right,” he said. Everything he does is now made this way. A chair leg, for example, could be cut and shaped more simply out of solid timber, “but it’s important to us that we keep the same narrative running all the way through our work,” Fish says.

Marc Fish, ‘Ethereal Desk’ chair, 2019 COURTESY: Marc Fish / PHOTOGRAPHER: Simon Eldon

Still, narrative and aesthetic purity carry a cost. Though advanced industrial technology has its place – the workshop is equipped with a laser cutter and a three-D printer for mocking up prototype models – there’s no economy of scale from batch production, no compromise on the individuality of every piece, the consideration given to every line and facet. Prices reflect this. The ‘Nautilus’ desk sold for £96,000, and the first ‘Ethereal’ desk (a translucent wisp of Sycamore veneer, resin and carbon fibre), was sold by Todd Merrill at last December’s Miami Design for $130,000. Smaller pieces, such as the ‘Ethereal’ chair taking shape in the workshop for display at this year’s PAD London in October, will be priced nearer £20,000.

Marc Fish, ‘Relics Triptych’, 2016 COURTESY: Marc Fish / PHOTOGRAPHER: Simon Eldon

That may seem a lot for a chair, however exquisite. But take off the production costs and divide by the hundreds of hours that go into the conception, design and making, and it doesn’t match the return on, say, a Jeff Koons balloon dog. On some of his smaller pieces, such as his intricately constructed memento mori ‘Relic’ vase series, the return on invested time comes in at about £30 an hour. Larger commissions are more profitable: Still, “I don’t think anybody gets into furniture-making for the money,” Fish says. “You get into it for the creative freedom that it gives you.”

You can view the article here also; https://thedesignedit.com/in-the-studio/marc-fish/

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Country & Town House, April 2019 featured Marc Fish’s work in its On Design News about What’s New. It says:

INCREDIBLE CARPENTRY The Ethereal desk by Marc Fish is made from thin veneers of sycamore, laminated and shaped into curves and held with resin. $130,000 from Todd Merrill gallery. marcfish.com

View the Article here - http://marcfish.com/docs/ CountryandTownhouse-April2019.pdf

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Financial Times How to Spend it magazine article on sculptural furniture. Read the whole article here;

https://howtospendit.ft.com/house-garden/205454-sculptural-furniture-pushing-wood-to-its-limits

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Sculptural furniture pushing wood to its limits

Dynamic designers and artists are reimagining wooden furniture with surprising twists, coaxing a familiar material into ever-more fantastical sculptural forms. Katrina Burroughs reports

Art meets artisanship and sculpture shakes hands with design in the latest functional artworks in wood. The sinuous silhouettes of chairs, consoles and lights in carved, laminated and scorched timber are informed by Constantin Brancusi, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore – and pay homage to solar systems, bodies of water and racing bicycles. Armed with a mix of traditional skills and 21st-century techniques, makers are focusing on creating highly collectable curvilinear centrepieces for inspiring interiors.

Read more here:

https://howtospendit.ft.com/house-garden/205454-sculptural-furniture-pushing-wood-to-its-limits

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Modern Luxury magazine ran an article on Design Miami where Marc Fish’s Ethereal Desk featured in the top picks as ‘Most Sinuous’!

Click the photos above to see them. The copy above reads as;

MOST SINUOUS //

ETHEREAL DESK Todd Merrill Studio, New York

A key piece from English furniture designer Marc Fish’s new Ethereal series, the Ethereal desk features a revolutionary use of frosted resin and laminated wood that allows light to pass through in varying degrees and to ingenious effect. This unique materiality reflects Fish’s work developing innovative surfaces over the last 20 years. The result of this exploration is that the Ethereal desk conveys constantly shifting moods, delighting admirers with a quality that is both tactile and incandescent. Fish has long been captivated by nature, and the piece is meant to mimic the delicacy of leaf structures; the silhouette of the desk conveys a ribbonlike delicacy that masks its structural integrity.

“In the Ethereal desk, Marc Fish has raised his practical and material virtuosity to an extraordinary new level,” says celebrated British furniture maker John Makepeace. “The blend of materials in the surface is especially beguiling.” 

From $120,000, toddmerrillstudio.com – Scott Drevnig.

You can view the piece and move photos here: http://marcfish.com/marc-fish-gallery/ethereal-desk.html

Download the entire PDF from Modern Luxury here.