"When you try to separate art and design you create a ghetto" - Job Smeets

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Studio Job founder Job Smeets looks back over his career to date and explains why sculpture is so important to his studio's work in this movie Dezeen filmed at Moooi's Unexpected Welcome exhibition in Milan.
"When we started, it was very simple: we wanted creative freedom," Smeets says. "The only way to reach creative freedom was to design sculptures, because when you do a sculpture, each sculpture can be a unique piece. That's perfect. Not for economical reasons, but it's perfect for creation because every time you can start to design a new piece."
Smeets continues: "We started to sculpt pieces and cast them in bronze. As with plastic, with bronze you can make any shape you like. Plastic is for the industry and bronze is for the art world, but I thought: let's turn that issue into something beautiful and introduce sculpture into design."
Studio Job's work straddles both the art and design worlds, but Smeets says he does not distinguish between one or the other.
"I really don't care," he says. "When you are trying to separate art from design, you are creating a ghetto, which is always a bad thing. Let's not have borders in creation."
Studio Job has been designing collections for Moooi since a range of paper furniture launched in 2006.
"The first thing you learn in Kindergarten is to work with paper," Smeets says. "So it's a very authentic approach."
Subsequent collections included a medieval chair made from plastic and German furniture with hand-painted drawings. Studio Job's latest pieces for Moooi's Unexpected Welcome collection include lamps shaped like upturned buckets.
"Now we're sitting here in a total design environment, we have 35 or 40 products we did for Moooi on show here," Smeets says. "I'm a happy artist and a happy designer."
However, Smeets believes that even in these industrial pieces, the influence of sculpture is still apparent.
"In a way, the Moooi pieces are becoming a little bit more sculptural," he says. "If you look at the bucket lamp series, for instance, it's a mixture of wood, of paper, of brass. It's quite interesting."
He continues. "[Today], we are allowed to do shit like that. Five years ago, if I came up with a bucket upside down on a wooden pedestal they would say, 'do it on your own, don't do it here.'"
"I think that has to do with trust. We are getting old people, and people tend to trust you when you're over forty, no?"