A hand-built sculptural pen holder in stoneware under a matte tan glaze, the smaller of the two Leafage pieces. Quirion made it for what she calls the back-to-school season, the precise moment when nature is still striving but slowly gets overcome by the unavoidable. Its withering foliage holds the stamp of passing time in sun-drenched color, grateful and already longing for glorious summer days ahead.
 
Karen Quirion is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Thetford Mines, Quebec, and the founder of the label KQK, where ceramics grew out of her fashion practice. A self-taught ceramicist and long-time lover of brutalist architecture, she hand-builds every piece through coiling, pinching, and slab building, an experiment in deconstruction through organic forms.

About the Abundance & Decay Collection
 
For this collection, we invited our artists to create objects exploring the moment when the exuberant growth of summer begins its slide into the decay of autumn, the friction between the heavy, nectar-filled bloom and the curling, brown edge of the leaf, and the transformative energy found in seasons of transition.