The Bushwick studio where Madeline Coven works is situated on the hazy, industrial border between Queens and Brooklyn. The surrounding neighborhood is an eclectic mix of beef distributors, hydraulic repair shops, bustling gay nightclubs, and expansive indoor adventure parks, creating a vibrant backdrop of grit and commerce. Coven shares a fourth-floor workspace in this industrial corridor inside a building that has been partially converted into an exclusive, high-end members’ club. Visitors enter through a ground-floor lobby decked out in a curated suite of vintage furniture before taking the elevator up to her creative domain. Inside the studio, the air is frequently noisy with the clatter of street construction, and the room itself is split in character: one side is packed floor-to-ceiling with stacked cardboard boxes, while the other is outfitted with the drill presses, ventilation hoses, and heavy tools that form the familiar vernacular of working makers.
When Jill Singer visited Coven in her studio, the designer was reviewing metal-casting tests intended for an upcoming exhibition in Santa Fe. The conversation quickly gravitated toward the physical and metaphorical limits of her intricate design process. Using reference images sourced directly from the paleontology archives of a New Mexico university, Coven had meticulously carved the imprints of two prehistoric fossils into blocks of wood, subsequently casting the resulting negative spaces in molten aluminum.
"I’m always trying to recreate patterns or textures that occur naturally because they’re so unbelievable to me," Coven explains. "But the way they already exist is better than what I could ever make."
In this particular experiment, the intense heat of the molten metal burned away some of the painstaking fine detail she had carved into the wood. When asked if such outcomes felt frustrating—or even Sisyphean—given the constant pursuit of an impossible benchmark, her response was refreshingly grounded.
"I’m not striving for perfection," Coven says.
That sentiment is an unusual and welcome perspective to hear from any creative professional. Coming from Coven, it functions simultaneously as a healthy boundary established by a pragmatic zillennial artist and as a succinct summary of her entire artistic philosophy. Before striking out to establish her independent studio practice, she spent three formative years working within the studio of noted furniture designer Minjae Kim. She credits Kim with helping her cultivate a resilient framework for her own workspace, noting that "he does so much with so little and makes ideas work even without all the perfect tools and access." Prior to her time with Kim, Coven studied sculpture in college and subsequently worked as an artist’s assistant in Los Angeles.
Perhaps because her professional roots lie firmly in fine art rather than industrial design—where the primary focus is typically on engineering the most functional or efficient method of production—Coven’s studio operates much more like an experimental laboratory. She brings her sculptural concepts into physical reality only after enduring long periods of trial and error, observing closely how various unconventional materials behave, shift, and react under different conditions. This disciplined habit of observation is a trait she likely inherited from her father, an herbalist who frequently led her on unhurried walks along the drainage and clearance ditches surrounding her childhood home in Albuquerque.
"He’d stop and point out every plant and take photos of it, and it would take forever to go on a short walk," she recalls. "But I think that close observation of the world influenced me a lot."
The very first piece of functional design Coven ever created was born from a collaboration with a fellow alumnus of Minjae Kim’s studio, Jenna Graziano. Together, the pair constructed a straight-backed seat featuring a sturdy frame made from sand-cast recycled aluminum and a supportive sling crafted from cowhide. Although that collaboration took place three years ago, nearly everything Coven has designed and produced since then has drawn from a remarkably consistent material palette, with occasional tactical detours into fiberglass and resin.
"I like materials that are forgiving, and I like for there to be room for error so unexpected things can happen," Coven notes.
This philosophy has translated into high-profile commissions and gallery exhibitions across the globe. For Tribeca gallerist Jacqueline Sullivan, Coven developed a striking series of wall sconces fashioned from animal hides accented with pewter embellishments, followed by a subsequent collection of wall lights featuring flinty, lunar screens. These screens were created by pouring sheets of molten pewter into shallow trays, then actively manipulating the metal as it cooled and solidified. For St Vincents in Antwerp, Belgium, Coven produced a set of sophisticated mahogany tables edged in cowhide and pinned securely with squares of pewter reminiscent of classic belt buckles. Continuing this trajectory, she debuted a fresh body of work centered on a series of nonfunctioning vessels crafted from cow and goat hides, firmly fastened together with custom pewter hardware.
Evidence of these material experiments is scattered abundantly throughout Coven’s studio. The windowsill is lined with the various seeds, stones, and organic objects she frequently casts in metal; baking trays are piled high with sculptural, globular metal forms; and a hot plate sits steadily at her workstation, ready to melt tin down into a malleable, workable goo. Animal hides—which Coven began sourcing years ago from a local leather-and-furs shop in Albuquerque as a versatile, alternative structural medium to fiberglass—are draped and draped over wooden armatures or rolled up in massive sheets across the floor like ancient scrolls, their natural, scalloped edges flaring outward into the room.
"I’ve mostly been making tests so far," she says of the vessels bound for her gallery presentations, flipping open a sketchbook filled with hand-drawn sample vases characterized by thick, muscular bodies and pursed lips.
Her recent research has also delved into the historical anthropology of canteens, which were traditionally constructed from animal hides and treated with beeswax to ensure they could retain and transport water. In her current studio tests, Coven begins by soaking the raw hides thoroughly in water, then wrapping them tightly around welded steel armatures to dry, carefully observing how the material naturally expands, tightens, and reacts to its structural constraints.
Observing a cowhide at such close range reveals a material that, while sharing a distinct visual and structural resemblance to fiberglass, never lets the viewer forget its organic origins. When a hide is rolled out across the studio floor in its entirety, subtle natural details emerge, such as tiny follicles or deeper pigmentation patches marking areas where the animal once held higher fat concentrations. Draped across rigid metal frames, the hides naturally form expressive folds that evoke living skin or, at times, ribbons of spun candy.
"There’s something very alive about it," Coven observes. "It has a mind of its own. I’ve had finished pieces even warp a bit over time, which shows how it’s still living and changing."
This persistent use of animal skin introduces deeper philosophical questions regarding the implications of incorporating a once-living organism into contemporary design objects. These inquiries occasionally manifest in unexpected ways, such as during the installation of her tables at St Vincents earlier in the year, when a gallery dog repeatedly sniffed the furniture.
"I was like, Oh right, this is a chew toy," she recalls with a laugh.
"There’s an eeriness to it, for sure," Coven admits, reflecting on the nature of the material. "I mean, it’s dead, and that feels heavy. But I’m not trying to ignore that weightiness."
These profound considerations are perhaps the exact questions every emerging designer wrestles with at the dawn of their professional career: navigating identity, understanding the physical and cultural ramifications of what is brought into the world, and questioning whether an ethical framework truly exists for manufacturing physical objects today. The distinction in Coven’s practice is that, at a relatively tender age in her career, she is willing to confront these complex issues directly and out in the open. The resulting body of work remains deeply thoughtful, rigorously considered, and compellingly resonant.
