WOODlife is proud of it's colorful partnership with Pernille Snedker Hansen, a renowned Copenhagen based artist.
SNEDKER STUDIO does marbelous things with wood. Using an age-old Japanese technique, Pernille Snedker Hansen applies marbled color to natural wood, both emphasizing and reflecting the wood’s unique grain. As such, the wood is visually renewed and intensified. Each Marbelous Project is bespoke and made to order due to the time-consuming nature of the process. Each plank is absolutely unique by its colour and pattern, is hand made by Pernille and is to be considered an ARTWORK.
Suminagashi
Pernille Snedker Hansen is fascinated by the detail in nature and was looking for a technique that would magnify those elements when she found inspiration in an ancient Japanese art. The technique in question is suminagashi, which involves transferring ink floating in water onto wood to produce patterns like those found in marble. By combining suminagashi with more recent Western marbling techniques, she has developed a process to create a distinctive flooring that she calls Marbelous Wood.
Pernille sets out to transform interiors into immersive artworks, challenging how we look at and experience the surfaces around us.
How it started
Pernille was experimenting with making patterns with this marbling technique and was testing and transferring it onto different materials. By chance, her boyfriend found some floorboards on the street. He sanded them down for her and she dipped them.
Immediately, it became clear that the inherent ornament of the wood had a nice dialogue with the applied marbling pattern. The wood’s rings were shining through the applied marbling pattern and it gave a unique materiality.
Pernille's made her first experiments on pine wood. However, pine is a softwood and the goal was to develop a concept for wood floors. "The floor is the soul of any room; it represents a large surface which creates a stage for visual experience, and I find this changing visual experience, through the person’s moving perspective, both interesting and inspirational."
Searching for the right wood
"After a while I got in touch with WOODlife. The owners, educated forest engineers by origin, share my deep passion for wood as a living material and have a deep understanding of wood characteristics, technical behavior and esthetics.
Together, we have tested several wood species, surface structures and pre-treatments. In the end we concluded to work with white Baltic ash from here on. White Baltic ash is bright, with a pronounced, distinctive wood grain and it's just as hard as oak. Next to that, WOODlife managed to develop a special surface pre-treatment which optimizes the transfer of my ink onto their wood".
WOODlife marbled floor in Robert Downey Jr's house in East Hampton.
WOODlife blue marbled herringbone.
