Plastic Fantastic

[By Lilam Ramzi in Vogue, October 2018 issue]"I'm based in Ireland, as you can probably tell," says artist and sculptural furniture-maker Sasha Sykes, her every word inflected with a lilting brogue. She's phoning from her Dublin studio, where she crafts whimsical plant- and petal-strewn works that betray her origin just as clearly - the yellow gorse flowers, wild roses, and ferns are all foraged from the foothills of the Wicklow mountains by Sykes herself. Her pieces were initially inspired by a job she held years ago designing store interiors in London, which introduced her to the aesthetics of plastics. Sykes's new work, a room divider, fixes seaweed she fished from the Irish Sea in clear resin; it forms a shape that pays homage to modernist design pioneer (and fellow Irishwoman) Eileen Gray's famous "brick screen," with its stacked alternating panels. See Sykes's work at PAD London's fair in October and, come November, at Manhattan's Voltz Clarke Gallery - two cities to which the artist feels indebted: "It was living in London and New York that gave me such a nostalgia and appreciation for how incredible my country and landscape art."