Having fled Nazi-occupied Austria during World War II, the ceramicist Lucie Rie began making buttons for the fashion industry as a means of supporting herself while establishing her new studio in London. Inspired by Rie’s venture into button-making, Kettle’s Yard has produced Artists Buttons, a project that has commissioned ten contemporary artists to create a series of limited-edition artworks in response to Rie’s practice.
Contributions include Jonathan Anderson’s jesmonite reimagining of his pigeon bag for JW Anderson; and Edmund de Waal’s white porcelain discs, delicately inscribed with Rie’s name and studio addresses in Vienna and London.
Each set of buttons is packaged in a bespoke charcoal grey stitched box, accented by brass staples and finished with debossed typography set in Piloti by the APFEL Type Foundry. Piloti’s tapered stems are a nod to Rie’s ceramic forms, and extends the identity first created for Kettle’s Yard’s exhibition and catalogue Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery.
Lucie Rie, Buttons, 1940s, earthenware
The artists are Ai Weiwei, Jonathan Anderson, Rana Begum, Edmund de Waal, Antony Gormley, Callum Innes, Jennifer Lee, Cornelia Parker, Vicken Parsons and Caroline Walker.
