Hanging With Corie Humble
Corie Humble

 

ARTIST CORIE HUMBLE FUSES GEOMETRIC SHAPES AND LIGHT-CATCHING METALS TO CRAFT MESMERIZING MOBILES. JUST ADD AIR (PLANTS).
Story by Diana Keeler
Photography by Kate Mathis | Portrait by David Lovas

When the call came from Bloomist to adapt her geometric bronze and brass mobiles for air plants, designer Corie Humble was prepared. “I have nine plants in the room I’m sitting in right now—I think it’s actually nine plants per room, in a one-bedroom apartment,” she says from her Circle + Light Studio in Austin, the day before she leaves to lead a leather-crafting workshop in Ethiopia. “I’m surrounded by them!”

“THEY JUST HAVE THIS FEELING OF AHH — THE MATERIALS ARE SO WARM, AND I NEVER GET TIRED OF WATCHING THEM MOVE.”

Humble’s mobiles were a surprise birth, the product of a long corporate design career focus on small leather goods catalyzed by personal creative exploration, including a class on jewelry making. Humble found herself challenging jewelry’s intimate scale with a prototype for the mobile, handcrafted from brass and bronze cadged through her jewelry instructor’s connections and constructed with her teacher’s advice. “If you’re working with a technical person, you can come together and make something beautiful,” she says. “That was what was helpful about taking a jewelry class with a teacher who’s been doing it since, like, 1988— I could say to her what I wanted to do, and she was like, ‘You just do this, this, this and this.’”

Some of the initial responses to the mobile were tentative: “People were, like, ‘What? Is it for babies?’” Humble says with a laugh. “A mobile is a standard design object at this point! The first one looked a little wonky, but it was still really cool, and I got a little bit obsessed and kept making them.” Partnerships with major retailers followed, ensuring that her mobiles—once a creative detour—are now the focus of her business efforts. “As a creative, you forget that it’s a lot of trial and error until you hit something that works,” she says. “And I never expected it, but this was the something that worked.”

Artist Corie Humble hand-cuts and assembles these minimal Botanical Wall Tubes at her studio in Austin, Texas. Add a fresh botanical, or use as a holder for a single stem.

Now, Humble prefers to partner with brands on her products, tweaking her tastes to suit their needs while seeking out the same sort of creative challenges that initially brought her to mobiles. For her work with Bloomist, Humble contended with the problem of the air plants' variable weights. "When you add extra weight, it changes the balance, and I couldn't do a bar that goes straight across [as she had with earlier mobiles]. Instead, I made an arc, so it doesn't un-level if you change the weight with an air plant." she says. She addressed the problem with a series of experiments. "I was like, I'm figuring this out," she says. "I just wanted to know for myself." How'd she solve the problem? "That's the secret," she says "It's the magic in the mobile."

After resolving the question of balance, Humble's biggest success with this new work is integrating a living, breathing element while ensuring they remain as sophisticated and spare as the original. It's an effort representative of her focus on paring back. "When I was younger, I made things that were just too finicky and over-thought," she says. "I was trying too hard--if you do two or three special things, it kills it. Now my rule is kind of, everything is effortless and minimal--as minimal as the pieces needs to be, with one special thing. it comes from my work in leather design--if I design 150 pieces of small leather goods, you can be so standard with every single part of it--but it has to have one thing that makes you go Ahh. I think the mobiles innately make you do that--I never get tired of looking at them, even when it's just the fan rotating, and the mobile moves."