Niki Collier Design

A maker who works from a small studio in the heart of the city Niki Collier considers herself a Dubliner in essence. Although she was born in Bulgaria and moved to Ireland 12 years ago, she has started her family, her maker path and build her studio and her home here in Dublin. Her work responds to a need in our environment to communicate with organic shapes in both furniture and wearable
art.
She aspires to transforming natural materials to interactive playful objects which yield to a multifunctional usage in the
context of becoming our treasured life long companions. In that, felting is her ultimate answer and constantly present medium as it offers limitless possibilities both as a stand alone technique in creating exceptional one off pieces and in developing editions of coveted objects. Niki is drawn to felt as it readily allows transformation of an exiting objects to a new objects with completely different structural and visual characteristics. As such she sees it as the body of her maker’s practice.

The objects that she develop vary in size and function: baskets, cribs, lamps and toys, rugs and blankets, clothing and jewlery. They all aim to be a quite celabration of our environment and a comfortable way to express ourselves through it.

This year Niki works on a series of objects that are united the motto ‘My City is My Sanctuary’. The work is motivated by the objervation that we often associate cities with faceless inhumanity. Niki wants to develop a series of objects reflecting an opposite opinion: the city is kind to its dwellers as it offers tolerance towards extremes and eccentrics and always with the kind reassurance that it can put our personal drama into perspective. She is using natural uncoloured fibres with leather insets of Dublin silhouettes to express her stand that some of us feel safe in the city. In fact, the city is our sanctuary. The series will be functional outdoor and indoor objects for children.