In Bushwick, Madeline Coven Shapes Cowhide Into Vessels

The studio where Madeline Coven works sits on the hazy border between Queens and Brooklyn, in a pocket of Bushwick crowded with beef distributors, hydraulic repair shops, gay nightclubs and indoor adventure parks. Her fourth-floor space, shared with another artist, is in a building partly converted into a high-end members’ club; visitors enter through a lobby furnished with vintage pieces and ride the elevator up to a room that rattles with street construction and is packed with boxes, drill presses and ventilation hoses.

Coven, a designer originally from Albuquerque, is preparing for a show of new work at Galerie Was on the Lower East Side, which is set to debut in November. The body of work is a series of nonfunctioning vessels made from cow and goat hide, fastened with pewter hardware, according to a studio visit published by Curbed. At the time of the visit, she was still in the testing phase, flipping through a sketchbook of sample vases with thick bodies and pursed lips, and researching the history of canteens, which were often made from animal hides and sealed with beeswax to hold water.

The process is hands-on and deliberately open-ended. Coven soaks the hides in water, wraps them around a welded steel frame to dry, and watches the material expand and contract. The results resemble fiberglass at a glance, but the hide never lets you forget its origin: rolled out in full, it shows follicles and darker patches where the animal may once have carried more fat, and draped over metal it folds like skin or, occasionally, spun candy. “There’s something very alive about it,” Coven told Curbed. “It has a mind of its own.” She has had finished pieces warp slightly over time, which she reads as proof that the material is still changing.

The hides come from a leather-and-furs shop in her hometown, a source she began tapping years ago as an alternative to fiberglass. Around the studio, they are draped over wooden bases or rolled into great sheets on the floor, their scalloped edges flaring outward. The windowsill holds seeds and stones she casts in metal, baking trays hold globular metal forms, and a hot plate waits to turn tin into malleable goo.

Coven’s approach is more laboratory than factory. She studied sculpture in college, worked as an artist’s assistant in Los Angeles, and spent three years in the studio of furniture designer Minjae Kim, who she says taught her to make ideas work without perfect tools. She sees her art-school background as the reason she treats materials as subjects of long experimentation rather than problems of efficient production. Her father, an herbalist, may have shaped that habit: he would stop on walks along the clearance ditches near her childhood home to point out and photograph every plant.

That tolerance for chance runs through her portfolio. Her first design, made with fellow Kim alum Jenna Graziano, was a straight-backed seat with a sand-cast recycled aluminum frame and a cowhide sling. Since then she has made pewter-accented hide sconces and wall lights for Tribeca gallerist Jacqueline Sullivan, and mahogany tables edged in cowhide and pinned with pewter squares resembling belt buckles for St Vincents in Antwerp. When a dog kept sniffing the tables during installation earlier this year, she recalls thinking, “Oh right, this is a chew toy.”

A metal-casting test for a separate exhibition in Santa Fe shows her philosophy in miniature. After carving the imprint of two prehistoric fossils into wood, based on images from a New Mexico university’s paleontology archives, she cast the voids in aluminum, and the hot metal burned away some of the detail. Coven was unbothered. “I’m not striving for perfection,” she said.