Eleanor Flegg looks at key pieces by Zelouf+Bell that advance contemporary design while referencing past masters.
If craft can be described as skilled making, and art as the expression of the human spirit, both qualities can reside in the same object without conflict. There are few stronger examples of this in early 21st-century Ireland than the elegant furniture of Zelouf+Bell, which has much to say for itself (and not all of it entirely proper).
Zelouf+Bell have been making furniture for more than twenty years now, a creative partnership of the Belfast-born Michael Bell, who, he claims, abandoned a promising career in the tobacco industry to make one-off pieces of furniture, and the energetic Susan Zelouf, whose background is in music and that wide sweep of creative endeavour more typical of her native New York than of Ireland. Zelouf+Bell are deeply committed to their process. They have refused to divide their practice between ‘art pieces’ made by themselves and a production line made more affordable by elements of factory production or foreign manufacture. Their furniture is handmade in Ireland by Bell, with a team of craftspeople. This places them firmly in the high-craft price bracket dedicated, as the National Museum’s Jennifer Goff describes, to ‘the haute couture of Irish furniture design, created for a discerning clientele.’ It is a stance that recalls an era where there was no shame in connoisseurship and the love of fine things was proud to speak its name.
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