Dawn Bendick’s Wool-Silk Floorcoverings Reference Her Glass Totems

Sculptor Dawn Bendick is best known for casting stacked dichroic-glass totems from objects found on her rural Kent, U.K., property. Now, she’s making art of a softer variety: floorcoverings. Conceived with luxury rugmaker FJ Hakimian, the four designs—Rock Stack, Boulder, Pond, and Gradated Pavers—debuted at Charles Burnand Gallery during London Craft Week. The wool-silk compositions, produced by artisans in Nepal using Tibetan looping techniques and small-batch pot dyeing, were presented beside new kiln-formed works to highlight the connections between them. The colors in Rock Stack, for instance, “were chosen as a direct reference to the two-tone qualities of the glass sculptures,” Bendick explains. The dialogue between hard and soft is further informed by the artist’s fashion background: Bendick graduated from FIT in New York and worked for Anthropologie and Calvin Klein before continuing her studies and pivoting to more sculptural mediums—and a different country—at Central Saint Martins. fjhakimian.com