Panorammma’s design work is a mixture of fictional worlds

The work of Panorammma, the Mexico Metropolis-based design studio of 29-year outdated Maika Palazuelos, blends numerous references and supplies. The bizarre objects she crafts – from tables and chairs to lamps and vessels – turn into signifiers of tales, settings or time durations simply out of attain. 

Panorammma: playfulness and darkness

In “Wax Alarm Clock” (2022), what appears to be a chrome steel medical cupboard opens to disclose itself as a candle holder; the candle inside is pierced with steel nails that loudly fall on to a steel tray beneath because it burns, re-enacting how historical alarm clocks labored. In “Chainmail Droplet Lamp” (2023), a single-pendant chandelier contains a glass sphere encased in outsized, chunky metal chainmail; though cocoon-like in look, the materiality invitations us to consider medieval armour.

‘I name all these objects pseudo props,’ says Palazuelos, including that she likes to create furnishings that introduces ‘concepts of fiction’ into an inside house and ‘displaces your mode of residing.’ There’s a subversion and playfulness to the work – in “Ball Foot Chair” (2020), a chair sits on 4 steel spheres – however there may be additionally a darkness.

In “Comfortable Vessel Assortment” (2021–22), flesh-like silicone vessels are stitched along with black silk sutures and imprisoned in metal bars and screws, recalling the horrors of early medication. In “Establishment Chair” (2020), a sheet of white lamb leather-based is connected to an unforgiving steel body to turn into a seat resembling a scientific curtain.

To the query of why she returns repeatedly to the thought of medical settings, Palazuelos reveals it’s a method for her to decipher the expertise of getting remedy for most cancers whereas she was learning artwork, years in the past. ‘I actually began to concentrate to how the aesthetics of a scientific house affected me as a affected person,’ she says.

Palazuelos grew up in Monterrey, Mexico, and studied artwork and portray in each Mexico and the US. She started to undertake manufacturing design while working for an artwork truthful and a perfumery in Mexico Metropolis, and consequently began to make her personal furnishings out of a need to experiment. As folks requested to purchase her items, she grew her design work and established Panorammma. In 2022, she accomplished a grasp’s diploma in modern design in Barcelona earlier than returning to the Mexican capital.

Her settings and environment evidently affect her work. In “Neolithic Thinker” (2020), a sculptural stool in arch type, she turned to the fabric of tezontle, a extremely oxidised and porous volcanic rock native to the realm round Mexico Metropolis, and which has been used extensively for constructions there. ‘I like that geologically particular info that the stone provides concerning the provenance of the piece,’ says Palazuelos.

The work was additionally impressed by her analysis into structure from the Neolithic period in Mexico, significantly arches, which have now turn into fragments of ruins for archaeologists. ‘I like serious about issues that was structure however that now we are able to analyse in sculptural phrases,’ she says.