House of Rubber
House of Rubber (founded by Marlou Breuls) is a multidisciplinary Amsterdam studio making tactile, absurd objects from rubber, textile and ceramics, wobbling, shimmering and just a little too touchable.
AVAILABLE ARTWORKs
ABOUT
House of Rubber is the multidisciplinary studio of Marlou Breuls, based in Amsterdam. Breuls started out in 2016 under her own name and was trained as a fashion designer, but soon found that her interest lay less in the garment than in the material itself and the forms it could produce. She began experimenting with clay, rubber and plaster, largely self-taught, and took up a residency at the EKWC, the European Ceramic Work Centre, without any prior experience of working with clay. In 2022 she continued the practice as House of Rubber: not a farewell to fashion, but a widening of it into a platform where others can contribute and grow.
The name plays on the ring of the great fashion houses, combined with the discomfort that rubber provokes as a material. But rubber is only part of it; what it really names is a house of something extremely flexible, liquid, strange, in principle anything at all. Textile, ceramics and rubber form the core vocabulary, with occasional excursions into soft robotics. Much of the work is made with a self-built machine that shoots liquid material, producing forms that stretch, bounce and look wet without being so.
The work does not depart from a concept mapped out in advance, but follows coincidence, surprise and sheer material obsession. In the process the boundaries between fashion, object, body and space keep shifting: the object is humanised, the body objectified, and oppositions between inside and outside, organic and artificial, depth and surface are deliberately blurred. The results provoke curiosity, carry humour, cause a little social discomfort, and occasionally require a forklift to move.
Among the best-known works is Lady in Rug, an enormous hand-tufted flying (more or less) carpet sculpture covered in twelve square metres of wool, presented at This Art Fair and Dutch Design Week among others. Curly Girl, an immovable ceramic sculpture, emerged at the EKWC from a supersized clay extruder. The studio also produces the Whipped Jewels: extravagant, bedazzled silicone jewellery full of sensory play.
Alongside autonomous work, House of Rubber takes on commissions, set design and collaborations,from Vlisco to Björk and Grimes, and enjoys turning other people's ideas into objects.