ANNE BRANDHØJ AND SIGNE FENSHOLT

Anne Brandhøj (b. 1984, Denmark) is an artist and designer whose practice centers around sustainability. From sourcing and harvesting timber to drying, processing, and finishing each piece by hand, her distinct designs take form around the natural irregularities of each length of wood. Its grain, knots, splits, and coloration guide her decisions and remain as elements of the final work. Rather than imposing her creative ideas on the material, Brandhøj works with the chance variations offered by nature, allowing her to incorporate offcuts that might otherwise end up as waste. Their unique textures and patterning are highlighted, polished into delicate eddies and currents that reveal the innate beauty of the material, whether made from oakwood, walnut, Douglas fir, cherry, or beech. In addition to her playful functional objects, she creates large-scale sculptures whose undulating vertical forms reiterate abstract motifs as though materializing the movement of sound—its waves, ripples, and echoes.

Brandhøj's collaborative series of wood and porcelain works, titled Rooting, draws inspiriation from the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 5, which emphasizes the pivotal imporatnce of care work in addressing gender quality and dismantling discrimantory legal frameworks. The series is made with Copenhagen-based ceramicist Signe Fensholt as a set of functional pedestals and non-functional scuptures, which play, tongue-in-cheek, on issues of support, care, and who has to "bear the load" of unpaid care work. 

Brandhøj received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in furniture design from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She is a founding partner of Bly Studio, and currently serves as a professor of design at Kunsthøjskolen in Holbæk, Denmark. She has exhibited at the Rian Design Museum in Falkenberg, Denmark, and her work is in the collection of the Designmuseum Danmark.