Laura Casañas Maya: Ornament is no longer a crime

There’s something a bit ingenuous yet also unpredictable about Laura Casanas Maya’s painstaking work, totally focused on the slow rhythm of her hands – hands that skilfully slip, interweave and knot kilometres of tiny synthetic and natural scraps. However, it’s not so much the vivid colour of the extraordinary contrasting bands that she tattoos along the iron tubes that’s so striking, but the history behind the storytelling. 

“I began to be interested in drapery, fringes and cords after reading Adolf Loos’ 1908 book Ornament and Crime,” she says. “While on one hand it seemed impossible that textile craft could be seen as a crime, on the other I was fascinated by the feminist implications.” The Austrian architect and author of the historic treatise maintained that decoration should be regarded as an affectation and the sign of a lack of cultural preparation, to the extent that men who felt they should instruct women on how to use and wear ornamentation demonstrated that they regarded her as a sex slave. The warning was clear: on one hand they would have done better to concern themselves with their own clothing and, on the other, the women would have been capable of managing perfectly well on their own. It goes without saying, therefore, that the father of modern architecture preferred the sobriety of simple volumes to a “rich” type of architecture: “The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects of everyday use.” As for female emancipation, there’s still a long way to go.  

Fascinated by this intellectual digression, while recognising that minimalism has its own elegance, the designer with a diploma from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence (US) and a studio in Miami, was unwilling to comply with the mainstream. She then started turning to ornamentation to communicate her idea of design. “Design for me is the process through which I make my imagination tangible: it’s an opportunity to learn, evolve and challenge my own limits,” she said, weaving Loos into her own personal story. “I am Colombian, an expat born in Cali who emigrated to the United States when I was eight. My birth family is like many other South American ones – a mother and father who both worked, a ceramicist grandmother and lots of summer holidays spent in her workshop listening to her stories,” which brought her into contact with craftwork. “Nobody taught her how to do it, but her passion struck a chord with me, and I adored what she did. She taught me to pay attention to the detail,” which is also a starting point for her own creative process.