Eric Sloot

Eric Sloot has designed furniture, exhibitions and interiors since 1991, working with Paulien Berendsen as Studio Parade for Spectrum, Pastoe, Boijmans Van Beuningen, Design Museum Den Bosch and the Cuypershuis in Roermond, and as co-originator of IXXI. For the past several years he has also made furniture under his own name; FRANCY, built from thermally modified poplar, was the first.

The pieces that followed — FRANCY, ELS, HANS — take their outline from furniture typologies everyone already recognises: the bombé cabinet, the secretary desk, the longcase clock. Sloot keeps the silhouette familiar and rebuilds the surface entirely, ribbed rather than planed, so a form the eye already knows arrives carrying an unfamiliar texture.

Each cabinet is handcrafted in his own workshop from fast-growing poplar sourced in Brabant, preserved and finished with formaldehyde-free glue and a bio-based, transparent lacquer.

GROUND asked where a maker's authority comes from. Here that authority is tested against a room built for living. Sloot's cabinets already look at home before they arrive, their silhouettes borrowed from generations of domestic furniture, which is exactly what makes their presence on these floors quietly unsettling.

A visitor does not meet sculpture standing in for furniture; they meet furniture, fully functional, rebuilt from the outside in. The clock keeps no time and asks to. The cabinet still opens.

What Sloot brings into Maison d'Artiste is the question of what happens when a familiar object is made strange enough to be looked at again — in a space where looking and living are not usually kept apart.