“At Threadhold, We Transcend artists and brand’s Vitality threshold. "
Andrejs Sosenko
Andrejs Sosenko Artist' narrative
In terms of design Im looking back a lot. Im tired of hiding that elegance and beauty of the past do not fascinate me as much as they do. For some reason we decided that it should be left in the past. It's not, it's still here and people are literally traveling to different countries to see a building or a church. And let me tell you, usually it's not a contemporary one. Im trying to act on a feeling that we shouldn’t have discarded the designs of the past completely. instead we should have kept evolving the designs we have had before, minimalism could co-exist, I love it and it should be present, but overshadowing every design with modernism-inspired movements feels wrong to me.
When I started furniture design education for the first year I have been building modernist inspired furniture - functional, clean lines and ornament free. It was still pretty unique in my opinion but it was still modernism inspired. Because that is what everyone else was doing. Could be because it was Sweden, and Scandinavian designs are pretty conservative. Could be because international design tendencies are minimalism and efficiency. I didn’t even have a thought that I can create something not 100% efficient for it to be viable on the market. However, pretty soon I realised that I'm not having fun. And maybe the market itself isn’t efficient and human friendly. So I decided to have fun. Make something that comes from emotion, not efficiency in production. And it felt right. For the first time in my designer practice things started to feel absolutely right. The most surprising thing is that many other people liked it too. Because no matter how much different everyone is, we are all human and we all function by the same psychological principals. In my opinion if you take emotions out of design - you start conveying a message that emotions are optional. They aren’t. Modernist furniture/design ideology is pretty much providing clutter free (story free) spaces and objects for the user to fill it up with their own stories/lives. Since then that has become the standard in the industry. Only the last few years we are seeing some smaller scale productions of objects that have the stories contained in them as they are being sold. What I'm trying to contribute with my designs is to inspire other designers to implement storytelling in their furniture and show some users that it potentially could be what some of them want (sometimes you don’t know what you want until you see it). Modernism is great and story-free objects/interior/exteriors have to exist, and its great that they do, however, the ratio of them to the story-containing new designs is what we have to work on, I think.
I have always been drawn to wood, it feels human. It feels cozy, it grows, ages, it reacts to tools. It is the only durable material that is organic and relatively easily shaped, and is not scary to me, like metals, or mushrooms—after I have watched "the last of us" of course. I also don’t think plastic could carry the same emotional weight for what I’m exploring. In terms of working with wood it is mostly using machinery to shape wood, hand carving, dremeling, sawing. Also a big part is laser cutting. I am exploring CNC too recently.
​​Contemporary ornament, for me, isn’t copying baroque scrolls. It’s keeping the qualities of historical ornament — balance, elegance, proportion — but replacing the symbols. To complement acanthus leaves, we get charging cables. Instead of mythological scenes, we get app icons. These aren’t random jokes. They’re documentation. Ornament becomes storytelling because it captures what defines our era: internet culture, fast food, constant connectivity. It turns furniture into a cultural archive. Contemporary ornamentation to me means also emotional connection. People thrive on connection with other beings and objects. If they can “read” an object and relate to it that is a perfect ground for connection. Connection means they keep product longer and enjoy it more. That is sustainability for me. I’m trying to separate ornamentation from the connotations of the past - wealth, power, class division and status symbol. I’m trying to show that ornamentation can mirror our current reality, yet take beauty and elegance from the ornamentation of the past, and we shouldn’t be afraid of it. We have enough techniques today to make ornaments available to every human regardless if they are rich or not. Another thing I'm trying to achieve is to make furniture piece into an art piece, which is less likely to be destroyed or thrown away soon and maybe it can survive a hundred years lets say. In that time when people see it, they will not know our lifestyles exactly the way they were, but the stories that we left behind might give them a better insight to what life was like before them. I’m not even talking about people of today just being attracted to some of the small details because they just find it cool to relate to a piece of furniture and feel represented. Like when they see “I love mayo” sign, they turn to me and say “I love mayo too!” With a smile on their face. That makes me happy to be a human sometimes.
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