Katie Stout (1989) currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BFA from RISD. She makes work that is a caricaturisation of furniture as it is traditionally understood. She utilises a diverse range of media and often unexpected techniques to make sculptures of furniture and household objects. Stout’s subtly subverts utilitarian forms to create an experience just past the threshold of what is comfortable, encouraging her audience to consider elements of the so-called deranged and demented in their everyday lives. Her work is disarming in its simultaneous sense of dark irony and joyful celebration. She peels back some of the layers of seriousness often associated with the concept of design to reveal the melodrama of family household life. Stout’s work was featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara’s 2017 exhibition, “Free Play” and is in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Dallas Art Museum. She exhibited at Design Miami in 2015 with a “Bedroom Curio”; collaborated with Bjarne Melgaard at the 2014 Whitney Biennial; won the first season of HGTV’s series “Ellen’s Design Challenge” in 2015 and collaborating with Jeremy Scott on his F/W 2018 collection.

Please, Sorry and Thank you
When she thinks of the perfect table setting, Katie Stout can’t help but think of the perfect hostess: the woman who is so busy entertaining, looking fabulous, sounding cultured, bantering intelligently, that she forgets to eat. Or maybe she just never really eats. Truly this is a great shame because eating should be everyone’s favourite table ritual, and objectively the most crucial. Imagining an antagonist to the perfect woman, Katie Stout imagined a naughty woman. Together with Augarten, she created (and painted) the perfect porcelain dinner set and table cloth for the woman who likes to be bad and loves to eat. The
patterns and motifs on the dinner set are inspired by Katie Stout’s perception of her own table rituals: messy, awkward and tardy. Liberated from glossy finishes, expectations and traditions, the seemingly low brow dinner set reminds us that sometimes one must descend to transcend. The eighteen plates are painted with bright colours and expressive manner; the motifs are layered juxtaposing historical shapes such as ribbons, with more abstract and primitive ones that need to be observed once the food has been enjoyed. Katie Stout has also intervened on one of the formal damask tablecloth of the castle, embroidering it to subtly encourage mischief.

Project in cooperation with Augarten Porzellan