Odd Matter, Overview

Var Design Parade Hyères 2015 cork award

We (Els Woldhek & Georgi Manassiev) started Odd Matter Studio in 2015, the year in which we first came to Hyères as participants in the Design Parade competition. In the years following we have been back on many occasions and have been fortunate to work with the villa Noailles on several different exhibitions and projects. But that first encounter and the residency that followed have been incredibly valuable to our work. The Mass project that came out of the residency was the first project in which we laid the foundations of our style. Our time at the Villa was elemental to our practice. During our residency we were lucky enough to work with cork from the Var region that allowed us to rethink and re-understand our process. The way we began to look at and negotiate with materiality had transformed, and we’re continuing tobuild up
on that foundation. Odd Matter creates objects for the domestic and public spaces that we inhabit. Rooted in a fictional domestic framework, the studio develops a process-led practice ranging from the hand-made, digital representations, freehand tactility, texture, to chaos and detail–inhabiting and exploring the gulf between art, as practice, and the domestic setup, as territory. We are obsessed with what we see, and all beginnings are based on sensory experiences. Each body of work will expand exponentially as we progress: our projects are an expression of the studio at a given moment, and as such their interpretation and meaning might adapt or evolve. They are part of an evolving narrative and therefore can never be ‘finished’. It is merely the thought or expression, the object, at that time which is finished. The thoughts, observations, emotions, experiences during the process will have an impact at some point on whatever follows. All pieces are characters, all processes and sub-processes flowing into one stream. On the occasion of this festival we are bringing together pieces from different periods, some consecutive and some far apart, so there has never been a real overview of our work or of its narrative as a broader landscape.