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What Do You Get When You Combine Brass Shavings, Crushed Minerals And Concrete?

I first spotted the work of Samuel Amoia two years ago during New York’s Design Week. Glittering and glorious, the cast crystals and coffee grounds embedded in concrete at AMMA’s booth caught my eye and I’ve been enraptured ever since. (Great pro-tip for all you designers trying to catch the eye of press during Design Week: Add crystals.)

Amoia — who now works independently as AMOIA Studio — has continued his mixed media castings, shifting his focus to natural materials ranging from blue calcite sourced from India to jasper from the Congo. Collaborating with his youngest brother, Dominic (previously a sculptor at AMMA), Amoia will be showing a new line of limited edition pieces, made exclusively for DeLorenzo Gallery in New York.

“The series came about summer 2015 when I began working with Adriana Friedman (director of DeLorenzo Gallery) and Tony DeLorenzo,” Amoia says. “My intention was to create a new collection of pieces that blended both my world and DeLorenzo’s. I work with minerals and naturals materials in a very innovative way that is fresh and new. DeLorenzo represents the greatest designers and exhibits timeless works of the 20th century. So, the idea was to create unique pieces that were distinctive, innovative and could eventually be a part of major collections, enduring the test of time.”

As with each collection, Amoia starts by sketching out each piece and creating a storyboard of designs around themes. For the DeLorenzo Gallery, the designer explored themes of delicacy and lightness of weight — a stark contrast to the heavy cement stools for which Amoia is best known. For this collection in particular, Amoia notes, most of the designs were dreamed up in his sketchbook over long plane rides traveling for work. “I get most my work done on planes,” he says. From there, Amoia edits down his designs, honing in on a few.

“My work is often masculine and pretty bold, and I lean towards a soft palette with strong geometry,” Amoia says. “For my collection for DeLorenzo, I explored softer and more feminine forms with bright tones using the natural color of the stones and minerals. In terms of form, I wanted more fluidity and juxtaposition while maintaining strength and sharp lines." 

Amoia cites the collection’s console made up of amorphous curves and the coffee table for its repetitious sight line as examples of this. "We played off the form and shape of the actual materials themselves as well,” he says. “You will notice the Italian onyx looks like it’s cracked everywhere and also the brass shavings have an irregular and organic shape to them. The form of both of these is where I see inspiration for the design of the console. So it’s nice to have this reflection to the design and material. All in all there is a nice narrative between the distinctive forms and designs and the materials themselves.”

Amoia presented his final ideas to Friedman and DeLorenzo, who made selections and helped choose the final minerals and material pairings for the collection. “We then fabricated our first prototype, a small end table made of crushed malachite from the Congo,” Amoia says. The small end table Amoia describes is one of the headlining pieces of the collection. Standing on five legs, the table is penetrated by ten rods, each spaced equidistant with alternating connections at their base.

For this series, Amoia started by cleaning and washing the minerals before crushing all the stones by hand, a laborious first step to many of the designer’s projects. “This takes the most time because they are done by hand and done one by one,” Amoia says. Friedman, DeLorenzo, and Amoia settled on malachite, lapis lazuli, Pyrite, black tourmaline and red jasper as their palette of minerals, looking to Brazil, Mexico and Africa, where the minerals are sourced, for inspiration.

“We also use brass, aluminum and nickel shavings, as well as beautiful slabs of white onyx from Italy,” Amoia says. “I want to use unexpected and over-looked materials — and it worked out!” For the shavings used to coat the surfaces of some of these pieces, Amoia collected fallen scraps and discarded bits of metal from the floors of his own studio. “We collected them and cleaned them to use on the pieces in pair with minerals and slabs,” he says. “We also experimented with casted and sculpted bronze. There is a nice narrative between all the materials and minerals used, which is also reflected in the designs and forms as well.”

Aluminum and brass were welded to create the underlying structure for many of the objects, making them relatively lightweight and easy to transport — an added benefit of the refined, sleek designs. “In previous collections, I didn’t think about the heavy weight and the costs to ship and transport things,” he says. “So that definitely played into factor here.” The frames were then lightly coated with the materials — minerals and metal shavings — using a delicately applied binding epoxy, adhering them to the form. After several layers, Amoia applies a finishing spray. For the bronze pieces, Amoia and his team mold a drum out of clay, casting in bronze to create the final form, before adding a patina by hand.

The final result are eight limited edition pieces across lighting, seating and accessories, beginning at $15,000. 

The AMOIA collection will be on display at DeLorenzo Gallery beginning Thursday, April 28 and continuing through New York Design Week.

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