My Elevator Pitch?

Furniture with personality?

Hi, I'm Suza Avolio, an artist and furniture designer. I transform boring, ugly, insignificant, even disgusting things into beautiful, glamorous personalities.

What does that mean? Personalities? Furniture? I don’t understand! What is it that you are doing?

Ok, let’s try again: I am an artist, no, a designer, a furniture designer. But somehow, I am an artist, too.

No, I don’t design wooden tables or chairs. At least not for now. And I don’t visit art fairs and museums to get inspired. I have a lot of ideas in my head or doodles and sketches on some sheet of paper…

In one minute

But people always want me to explain in one minute what I am doing – “Elevator Pitch”.

How can I explain that I love optical illusions, surrealistic paintings, Monty Python’s humour, synthesizer music, strange animals, exploring and discovering, analysing behaviours and that I try to translate all of that into a piece of furniture?

How can I explain with words that I transform emotions, impressions, sounds and thoughts into objects? In one minute?

Just like in movies

Well, I don’t fit into a pigeonhole. As a kid, I was an artist; the grown-ups told me to choose a serious job. I studied interior and furniture design, but I am still an artist, and I think and work like an artist.

For several years, I worked as a set designer, and I loved it. It’s not only about creating an interior or exterior ambiance, but you must tell a story. The play or film is about a small period in the life of the characters and won’t explain their whole story: where they come from, in which period they live, if they are rich or poor… The set does all that. In the blink of an eye, you know where you are and what’s going on.

I loved analysing the script and finding symbolisms and metaphors to tell things between the lines so that the attentive audience will discover more and more meanings during the play or the film and maybe even after. I have integrated these experiences into my furnishing objects: all my objects tell a story, mostly between the lines. That’s what I mean with “transforming objects into personalities.” They become the main character of their story.

The black sheep

The common thread is the “Black Sheep.” Black Sheep are mostly those who don’t fit into a pigeonhole, like insects which apparently don’t have any utility or cowboys beyond the stereotype of masculinity. Black Sheep are anything but boring, ugly, insignificant, disgusting…

You want my Elevator Pitch? I think not even the elevator to the top of the Burj Khalifa is enough.