Along the winding stretch of California’s scenic Highway One there is a room with a hundred hooks. Each unique in style and whimsy, these minor masterpieces are now on view at Blunk Space, the gallery dedicated to preserving JB Blunk’s legacy of blurring the boundaries of art and craft in woodworking, jewelry, and sculpture. Mariah Nielson, Blunk’s daughter and the keeper of his estate, commissioned a hundred artists and designers to create their own interpretations of the functional household object, inspired by her father’s exhibit "100 Plates." Artists including Bethan Laura Wood, Commune, Max Lamb, Minjae Kim, Nadia Yaron, Su Wu, and Frances Palmer took up the reins to pay homage to Blunk and offer their own visions of the quotidian object.
Below, Nielson gives CULTURED a window into her father’s work, the inspiration behind the exhibit, which closes Feb. 11, and her vision for what’s next at Blunk Space.
CULTURED: What has it been like to refashion your family legacy—how have you approached that process?
Mariah Nielson: It's been a long journey. I started working on the estate in a somewhat focused way in 2007, which was after I had finished studying architecture at CCAC, which is now CCA in San Francisco. My father had died in 2002, so between his death and 2007 the house was basically empty. I would bring friends up occasionally on the weekends, and these were all friends who are artists and designers, also studying at CCA. Watching their reactions allowed me to see JB's work in a new way or with a fresh perspective, because I was born in the home and of course, growing up, my father's work was what I knew. It was their reaction to the work that inspired this idea of establishing an artist's residency.
That residency program was run from 2007 to 2011 in collaboration with the Lucid Art Foundation, the nonprofit that Gordon Onslow Ford set up before he died. Managing the estate started in 2007, and I always referred to it as a side project or one facet of my work. I've been in and out of various jobs, all within the realm of the art and design world since I graduated from architecture school and moved to London in 2011. It was in 2013 that I began to focus more time on the estate in terms of setting up a website and being much more aggressive about organizing exhibitions. But it wasn't until I took this space on in 2020, the space here, that the estate became my full-time job.
CULTURED: Is there an element of your motivation that comes from trying to show another side or a different aspect of your father or his work?
Nielson: I think that making the JB Blunk book, published in 2020, was my attempt to present the breadth of JB's practice. During his lifetime, he was best known as a woodworker, wood sculptor, master of the chainsaw. People didn't really appreciate or even know that he made jewelry, paintings, and ceramic, that he had built his home, et cetera. This book was really the chance to present the breadth of his practice. That's something that I'm continually trying to underscore in my work: that he was an extremely important, multidisciplinary, cross disciplinary artist. That's now becoming more and more popular and common in the art world, but it was unusual around the time that he started making art. I think that had to do with his time training and living in Japan, because that culture doesn't regard the boundaries between art, craft, and design the way that western culture does.
CULTURED: How did the concept of the show come to you?
Nielson: "100 Hooks" was inspired by a show that JB organized in 1981 called "100 Plates" at David Cole Gallery here in Inverness. The idea was that JB would spend about a year making 100 plates. Some could be functional, some decorative, totally sculptural, big, small. Basically, JB just pushed and pulled at the parameters around this brief.
When I thought about continuing that concept, the idea was that we would invite 100 artists to each make one thing. I wasn't quite sure what that object would be, but then I remembered that when Martino Gamper and Francis Pritchard visited my new place in London two or three years ago, they brought a hook that Martino made and a little card that said, "Every house needs a hook." And I thought, This is it. We'll just make it a hook. Because every house needs a hook.
CULTURED: How do you try to change the framing of his legacy as you run the organization?
Nielson: Going back to my childhood and the fact that I was born and raised in this house that he built by hand, I grew up around work that was both sculptural and functional. That simple blurring of art categories is something that I'm most interested in.
I've also been experiencing conversations between past and present with my father since he died. Managing the estate is like communing with him in some way. I have a lot of unanswered questions and always will. It's a way of connecting with him and acknowledging creative legacy. And that's something that we're exploring here with all of our programs: Where are artists sourcing inspiration? What are they referencing in their work?
CULTURED: Are any of those unanswered questions related to his work?
Nielson: I never talked to my father about his creative process, ever. Neither did my brothers, and neither did my mother, nor did his first wife. It was just something that he lived with and experienced completely on his own. At the end of the day, he didn't want to talk about what he had been working on. There's just simple questions like that I would have loved to have engaged with.
CULTURED: Which participants are you particularly excited to be featuring?
Nielson: Carolina Jimenez created this piece which is basically a weaving. There's something so painterly about this piece, and there's just such a straightforward but also subtle connection to JB's paintings, which were always sculptural because he painted on scraps that were basically the offcuts from larger sculptures. When I saw this piece, I immediately thought of a painting, and yet it's an object. The slippage here is especially exciting.
I’m also really excited about the practice of the Cross Lypka studio duo—we had a show of their work last year. They’re an up and coming duo based in Oakland, and this is a great example of the direction that their work is going. This piece is totally functional, it actually could hang my twenty pounds of knitwear here. It looks delicate, and yet at the same time, it's totally robust. I love that.
CULTURED: What will become of these after the show is over?
Nielson: Well, we've sold 54, so they're going to be sent to their collectors and hopefully we'll sell everything. If they don't sell, they go back to the artist, because Blunk Space does not represent artists except JB. He's the only artist we represent and ever will.
