You could call her a lot of things-artist, designer, all-around creative soul. Adventurer fits Izabel Lam best.
Izabel Lam is whoever she wants to be on any given day, any given year.
Give her a slab of cold steel. Lam, a New York-based fashion designer, learns how to weld and how to design in metal. She chucks fashion for a new career in designing tableware and jewelry.
Give her a stream of hot liquid glass. She learns how to turn it into something artistic and then adds it to her home collection.
Give her an oxygen tank, a set of flippers and a swimming pool in Manhattan and she learns more than the obvious, scuba diving. She learns how to see the world (and her world of design) in another way.
“These are called minnows-tiny, tiny, little fish,” says Lam, who looks much younger than her 50 years, over coffee and eggs in a Manhattan diner. She’s narrating a photograph of herself, taken underwater on a dive off the coast of Thailand.
“And there are thousands of them. . . . It could be this whole room full of them and they move in unison. So imagine these things-shu, shu, shu,” she continues, darting her hands back and forth in time with the minnows’ movement. “And then there is sunlight and the reflection sets here and here,” again more hands waving at an imaginary place, her voice, a tad louder than a whisper. “It is just beautiful. . . . The minnows are around you. They’re like stars. It’s like you are surrounded by stars. It is just really amazing.”
Lam likes to plunge, flippers first, into one big underwater adventure a year. And then she comes up for air to do what she does best–design Liquid Art.
It’s what she calls her collections of accessories for both the home and body.
From her studio on a pier in Brooklyn, with the New York Bay at both her front and back doors, and the Statue of Liberty swimming beyond, Lam designs tableware that is sold in upscale shops around the world and used in fine restaurants, including Trio in Evanston and some of The Four Seasons Hotels’ restaurants. She also designs jewelry.
Bowls, glasses and goblets, cutlery, champagne coolers, salt and pepper shakers, candleholders and even candles–Lam’s home collection is mainly of metal (forged steel, aluminum, bronze, silver-plated brass) and glass (blown, cast and slumped).
But it is also of the water, so to speak.
Although Lam says she does not go diving for ideas (she doesn’t do bowls in the shape of fish or cutlery that looks exactly like seaweed), she does admit that her love for the water and for probing its depths has surfaced in her style.
Listening to the glass
There is a fluidity to her designs, a sense of quiet movement. Platters seem to ripple. Bowls undulate.
The lines that meander down the handle of her Stream cutlery “represents a stream, a small river coming down,” explains Lam, who was inspired while on a dive off the Big Island, Hawaii. “And also the oxidation is like lava, a volcano exploding and the lava coming down the side.”
Her Splash glassware, with a dollop of glass rising through each piece’s base, is Lam’s interpretation of a stone hitting the water. “The idea was: You throw a stone in the water and it comes up with a little point,” explains the artist.
The invisible hand of an ocean breeze drawing circles atop the sea comes to life in her Wind Over Water series. Spirals, wonderful in their imperfection, dance across the glass bowls and plates in this collection.
But the wind should not get all the credit, says Lam. The material itself had a lot to do with the design process.
“I had started to work in this glass workshop and I was fascinated by how glass forms itself–what you can do with it when you heat it, when you melt it, when you blow it, when you cast it, when you slump it. Glass is a material that tells you what to do,” explains Lam. “The Wind Over Water series was really a whole process of trial-and-errors and experiments and playing with it (the glass) and working with people who know what they are doing.”
Fashionable roots
The same can be said for Lam’s career, tossing in some serendipity along the way.
Lam was in her early 20s and working in her native Hong Kong in the fashion industry as a “sort of liaison between designers–the creative people–and manufacturing,” as she explains it, when she was asked to escort Ann Keagy on a tour of several Hong Kong clothing factories.
Keagy was then chairwoman of the fashion department at Parsons School of Design in New York. That chance encounter led to an invitation to attend the prestigious design school.
At 25, Lam was one of the oldest students at Parsons and one of the best. At 28, she snagged an apprenticeship with Calvin Klein. At 29, she was appointed knitwear designer for Geoffrey Beene. (“She was enormously talented,” says Beene. “She was into chenille and string sweaters. . . . Some people are doing those things today, and we were doing them back in the ’70s. She was imaginative.”)
In 1979-80, at the age of 33, she opened a studio on 7th Avenue with her own line of designer sportswear.
It was about eight years later that Lam, the adventurer, got the itch to try something new. It was welding. It led to making sculpture, which led to designing home accessories.
The mesmerizing calm
It was also about that time that Lam indulged her fascination with the deep blue sea and signed up for scuba diving lessons.
“I always like to try new things and do different things. So one day, I just decided `OK, I’ll try this,’ ” says Lam, who lives, like she works, on the water in Brooklyn. In the evenings, she likes to walk on the beach with a favorite companion–her Rottweiler, Duchesse.
Lam attributes her love for all things aqueous to her youth in Hong Kong, where she was surrounded by water. She was fascinated by the power of the sea, by the serenity it could breathe and the rage it could whip up. Water “has always been in my subconscious,” says Lam, who travels to Hong Kong where her family still lives, at least once a year.
But it was not until she put on flippers and a tank and dove 40 feet into a warm Caribbean Sea that that subconscious was “unlocked.”
“I was just mesmerized. It was so unusual and calm and soothing down there,” says Lam, who ran out of air on her first open-water test dive in the Caribbean and wound up sharing oxygen with the dive master. “You don’t have television, telephone. No one is around. You are in the ultimate primal world.”
Since taking that plunge in the Caribbean, where she does most of her diving, Lam has gone deep-sea swimming in the waters off Hawaii, Thailand, Jamaica and Mexico.
She has had close encounters with a poisonous lion fish and a cranky barracuda. She has heard the cries of pregnant humpback whales. She knows about all kinds of ominous coral. And she knows that the sea is really a murky pot of soup, until she shines an underwater torch into the depths and, like a magician, releases all the vivid colors that exist down there, untouched by sunlight.
`Feel the water’
“I have never been scuba diving, but it’s always been a fantasy of mine,” says Henry Adaniya, owner of Trio, an upscale Evanston restaurant that specializes in a fusion of French/Asian food–and in dramatic presentation. Butter is served on Lam’s cobalt blue Wind Over Water dishes. A caviar palette looks artful on another glass piece from Lam. Adaniya is one of Lam’s biggest fans.
“What attracts me to it is that you can feel the water through her plateware, through her design,” continues the restaurateur, who uses an assortment of her pieces both at the restaurant and at his home. “It works with me. It works with our food.”
Although Lam works on the design of each piece, she does not physically make them. Artisans around the world, whom she hand-picks, fabricate her designs.
Glassware is made by artisans in Virginia. Cutlery–all of which is hot-forged and not stamped from a flat piece of metal–is made by artisans in China. Cutlery is available in bronze, silver plate over bronze and stainless steel. Most of the silver-plate pieces in her collection are made in India.
Price is the reason she has gone the production route, instead of creating one-of-a-kind, art works. A set of salt and pepper shakers can be had for $30 to $45. Cutlery ranges from $60 to $150 a place setting, depending on the pattern and finish. A 13-inch glass bowl costs $40 to $70; champagne coolers, $225 to $250.
“I wanted to create something that is artistic, that is designed, with creative input into it, but I want people to be able to afford it, to use it every day and not put it on a pedestal and just look at it,” says Lam.
Although Lam intends to keep her home collection focused on tabletop accessories, she has designed a few small, occasional tables with steel bases and freeform glass tops and lighting. Upholstery may be in the future, says Lam.
Definitely in the future: A dive into the Red Sea. Another off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. A one-on-one with a shark.
“I’ve never seen one,” says Lam, of the latter, noting that she has not been on a dive in more than a year. Work has kept her busy. “It is just something I want to see with my own eyes,” she goes on. “I think I will be breathless.”
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The following Chicago area stores carry a selection of Izabel Lam tableware or can order pieces: Material Possessions, 54 E. Chestnut St., 312-280-4885, and 954 Green Bay Rd., Winnetka, 847-446-8840; and Findables, 907 W. Armitage Ave., 773-348-0674.
