Allsun Marie Campbell

Allsun Camp­bell is a Toronto based furni­ture designer and maker. She is currently start­ing her third and final year at Sheri­dan College in the furni­ture design program. Upon grad­u­at­ing from the Univer­sity of Toronto, Allsun saught to go in another direc­tion that combined craft­man­ship and design. There are several aesthetic links between her objects. More often than not, her work consists of straight and clean lines, and the pieces are visu­ally simple. There is an absence of deco­ra­tion, and thus the pieces are minimal and bare. She is drawn to the cube and vari­a­tions and divi­sions of that form. Her pieces are also some­what modular and customiz­able. There is always a drive to make all surfaces as func­tional as possi­ble and to elim­i­nate any element that does not contribute to that need. Visual clues that inspire her consist of mono­lithic, brutal­ist, and mini­mal­ist qual­i­ties. Even though her furni­ture can be customized to an extent, she is drawn to a fixed and iconic posi­tion that furni­ture can possess, and that allows it to exist and define a space on its own. The Bauhaus aesthetic remains a central inspi­ra­tion, with its empha­sis on elemen­tal, bare, and effi­cient forms. She is drawn to the use of straight lines and a bare aesthetic not neces­sar­ily because of its assumed relata­bil­ity as a basic form, but because of the distanc­ing effect it can some­times produce. This aesthetic has a poten­tial to raise ques­tions of our rela­tion­ship to objects and the imme­di­acy and acces­si­bil­ity of those objects, and how the notion of human­ism, and other aesthetic move­ments, relates to the environment.