This past April at Salone del Mobile, the annual furniture fair in Milan, Sten Studio, a Mexico City-based design firm, exhibited 11 sculptures, some as tall as seven feet, made from colorful, geometric stones placed on top of one another. Incorporating rocks from around the world — blue calcite from Mexico, green and pink onyx from the Middle East, Calacatta Lincoln marble from the United States — each totemlike structure was encircled by turquoise sand that, says the group’s founder and creative director, José Miguel Schnaider, represented both the dust that can accumulate when carving stone and an imagined intergalactic landscape. The show, held in a crumbling 19th-century villa on the outskirts of the city, was inspired by planetary alignment, archaeological ruins and global unity, says Schnaider, 34. “All societies observe the cosmos. Totems and vertical art are a universal concept that can be found in many cultures. In this intense time, we wanted to create art that represents what we have in common.”
Sten Studio’s columns are just one example of the growing number of monumental vertical pieces being created by artists today. The term “totem” originates from the Ojibwe word for one’s clan, but the first totems that Europeans encountered — on the North Pacific coast in the late 1700s — were carved from the trunks of red cedar trees by other Indigenous Americans. Contemporary makers, though, may be just as inspired by the ancient tradition of stone piling — including the cairns, or stacked rocks, used in Celtic, Gaelic, Nordic, South American and African cultures to mark graves, trails and other important sites — as they are by those towering wood pillars.
“This kind of art can be found from the East to the West,” says Casey McCafferty, 36, a New Jersey-based artist who started out making commercial furniture in Santa Monica, Calif., in 2010 and now creates abstract sculptures from red cedar and oak. He says he particularly likes “the way my body instinctually moves when I’m free carving. It’s ergonomic and gravitational — the path of least resistance.” Over time, his work has evolved into the eight-foot totems for which he’s known: towering amoebalike shapes with the odd displaced nose, ear or hand. Olivia Cognet, a multidisciplinary artist from Nice, France, produces unglazed stoneware sculpture informed by the work of Costantino Nivola, a mid-20th-century Italian sculptor from Sardinia who used sand-cast concrete to create totems based on prehistoric structures. “Totem-style sculpture was such a big part of midcentury décor,” says Cognet, 43, who runs a studio in Vallauris, a town on the Côte d’Azur, and also makes lighting with heaped ceramic circles, squares and other shapes that resemble the outlines of an ancient Egyptian sphinx head or eagle wings. “I don’t see the boundary between functional objects and my sculpture. Nothing is made with a mold, and it’s all art.”
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