WORDS Garreth Van Niekerk PHOTOS Courtesy of Inland Collective
Brett Rubin and Io Makandal’s Inland Collective is turning the creation of mirrors and glassware into a form of art for the home.
Despite – and perhaps because of – the pandemic’s many challenges, a new crop of designers are pooling their collective skills to create some of the country’s most inspiring new product designs. Among these next-gen initiatives is Inland Collective, a Johannesburg-based art glass and mirror company that launched at Always Welcome in Hyde Park late in 2020. Founded by artists and life partners Brett Rubin and Io Makandal, who have both worked with glass in their individual practices, Inland Collective blends the processes of art and design to rethink the way in which glass and mirror come together for the home.
For Io and Brett, glass has become a canvas, and its iterations take the form of sculptural wall mirrors, shining vases and gleaming bowls that are as beautiful to use as they are to behold. Their approach comes to life in Cosmos, Inland Collective’s first range of hanging mirrors and vessels, which looks skyward for inspiration. The collection’s transparent layers and colours subtly evoke the tactile lines of Io’s drawings and the minimalism of Brett’s photography, at times featuring his archive ceramic-printed and layered onto the mirrors themselves.
“Despite everything that happened, 2020 was a year of growth for many people, pushing them to think about things in quite a different way,” says Io of Inland’s origins. “In art, the whole ecology of the field is changing into something even more ambiguous. And so we took the opportunity to approach the creative process from a different angle that ultimately feeds back into our art making. Brett had been working with glass as a material for a while, and understood it. I had experimented with glass in my own work in the past as well, so together we wanted to do something more product-based that could bring our expertise together.”
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Inland Collective celebrates collaboration by working with artisans, architects, product designers and interior designers to push the development of their products forward. Inland’s Galaxy bowls are produced in collaboration with glass-blowers in Tshwane – including Retief van Wyk – and many Inland pieces have been treated with unique mirrored applications that embrace new technology as well as long-forgotten glasswork techniques. Work with architects such as Counterspace, designers such as Houtlander, and interior specialists including Red Cherry continues the exploration of glass in art, retail and residential contexts.
“Glass is an alluring and unforgiving material,” Brett says. “With wood or metal, you can buff mistakes out more easily – but with glass, you often need to start all over again. From the raw material to the outcome, you never quite know what to expect. I think because we’re trained in different ways to how an industrial designer would approach the design process, there’s something quite intuitive about it – a daringness to explore how things can turn out – so you stop worrying about mistakes, and start looking at where you can take a material as you go along.”
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