The Bushwick studio where Madeline Coven works is located on the hazy border between Queens and Brooklyn, tucked amid a cluster of beef distributors, hydraulic repair shops, bustling gay nightclubs, and indoor adventure parks. Her shared workspace with a fellow artist sits on the fourth floor of an industrial building that has been partially converted into a 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 Coven’s fourth-floor enclave. The space is constantly noisy with the industrial clatter of street construction, and inside, the room is packed floor-to-ceiling. One side is stacked high with cardboard storage boxes, while the other features the drill presses, heavy machinery, and ventilation hoses that form the standard vernacular of working makers.
When Jill Singer visited Coven in her studio, the designer was busy showing off metal-casting tests for an upcoming exhibition in Santa Fe, prompting a conversation that quickly turned toward the strict physical and metaphorical limits of her design process. Working with reference images she had uncovered deep within the paleontology archives of a New Mexico university, Coven had carefully carved the imprints of two prehistoric fossils into slabs of wood, subsequently casting the resulting voids in molten aluminum.
“I’m always trying to recreate patterns or textures that occur naturally because they’re so unbelievable to me,” Coven says. “But the way they already exist is better than what I could ever make.”
In this particular instance, the searing heat of the molten metal had burned away some of the painstaking, minute details she had spent hours carving into the wood block. When asked if she found it frustrating—or even Sisyphean—to constantly chase an impossible benchmark and fall just short, Coven offered a grounded perspective.
“I’m not striving for perfection,” she says.
That is a remarkably refreshing sentiment to hear from any creative professional. Coming from Coven, it sounds not only like a healthy professional boundary established by a self-aware artist, but also like a succinct, honest description of her entire design practice. Before striking out to launch her own independent studio, she spent three formative years working closely within the studio of prominent furniture designer Minjae Kim. She credits Kim with helping her formulate a sustainable framework for running a studio, noting that “he does so much with so little and makes ideas work even without all the perfect tools and access.” Before her time with Kim, Coven studied sculpture in college and subsequently worked as an artist’s assistant out in Los Angeles.
Perhaps because her educational background is rooted firmly in fine art rather than traditional industrial design—where practitioners typically focus on figuring out the most functional, efficient way to mass-produce an object or select the optimal engineering material—Coven’s studio functions much more like a scientific laboratory. She creates finished pieces only after enduring long, meticulous periods of experimentation, during which she quietly observes the unpredictable ways a raw material can act, bend, shift, and react. It is a deeply ingrained habit she likely inherited from her father, a professional herbalist who frequently took Coven on long, meandering walks along the clearance drainage ditches surrounding her childhood home in New Mexico.
“He’d stop and point out every plant and take photos of it, and it would take forever to go on a short walk. But I think that close observation of the world influenced me a lot,” she reflects.
The very first piece of furniture design Coven ever created was built in collaboration with another alumnus of Minjae Kim’s studio, Jenna Graziano. Together, the pair constructed a straight-backed seat featuring a heavy frame made from sand-cast recycled aluminum paired with a supportive sling crafted from raw cowhide. That initial collaborative effort took place three years ago, yet nearly everything Coven has designed and produced in the years since has drawn from that exact same cohesive materials palette, with occasional, deliberate detours into fiberglass and industrial resin.
“I like materials that are forgiving, and I like for there to be room for error so unexpected things can happen,” Coven explains.
Her material explorations have steadily caught the attention of prominent curators and gallerists. For Tribeca gallerist Jacqueline Sullivan, Coven devised a striking series of wall sconces fashioned from animal hides accented with intricate pewter embellishments. She later followed that up with a collection of wall lights featuring flinty, lunar-like screens made by pouring sheets of molten pewter into a shallow tray, where the metal is actively manipulated and shaped as it rapidly cools. For the renowned design destination St Vincents in Antwerp, Belgium, Coven manufactured a set of heavy mahogany tables edged completely in cowhide and pinned securely with gleaming squares of pewter that closely resemble classic belt buckles. And in November, she is set to debut her next major body of work at Galerie Was on the Lower East Side of Manhattan: an extensive series of nonfunctioning decorative vessels constructed from cowhide and goat hide, tightly fastened with bespoke pewter hardware.
Inside Coven’s Bushwick studio, tangible evidence of her ongoing material experiments is scattered across every available surface. The deep windowsill is lined with the various seeds and stones she frequently casts into heavy metal; standard baking trays are piled high with sculptural, globular metallic tests; and a hot plate sits permanently at her primary workstation, waiting to melt tin down into malleable goo. Animal hides—which Coven first began sourcing years ago from a specialized leather-and-furs shop in her hometown of Albuquerque as a tactile alternative to stiff fiberglass—are draped and wrapped loosely around wooden bases or rolled up in massive, heavy sheets on the floor like ancient manuscripts, their natural scalloped edges flaring dramatically outward.
“I’ve mostly been making tests so far,” she notes, flipping through the pages of a well-worn sketchbook filled with hand-drawn sample vases featuring thick, robust bodies and distinctly pursed lips. She has also spent considerable time researching the historical evolution of canteens, which were historically crafted from treated animal hides and sealed internally with beeswax to retain drinking water.
During her studio tests, Coven begins by thoroughly soaking the raw hides in water, then stretching and wrapping them tightly around a welded steel frame to dry, closely observing how the organic material naturally expands and contracts through the drying process. Witnessing a cowhide at such close physical range reveals its undeniable resemblance to fiberglass, yet the material never lets an observer forget its biological origin. When an individual hide is rolled out across the floor in its entirety, distinct natural follicles and darker patches become visible, marking where the living animal once carried excess fat. When draped over rigid metal armatures, the hides form deep, complex folds that evoke human skin or, at times, ribbons of spun candy.
“There’s something very alive about it,” Coven says, running a hand along a piece. “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.”
Her ongoing reliance on animal skin naturally brings up a deeper philosophical query regarding the ethics and consequences of incorporating a once-living organism into modern design objects. This reality occasionally presents unexpected logistical hurdles; during the installation of her tables at St Vincents earlier in the year, a gallery dog continuously wandered over to sniff 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, discussing the profound weight of the material. “I mean, it’s dead, and that feels heavy. But I’m not trying to ignore that weightiness.”
Perhaps these are precisely the kinds of complex questions that every ambitious young designer wrestles with at the dawn of their professional career: Who am I as a maker? What are the tangible ramifications and potential rewards of the physical objects I am putting into the world? Is there genuinely any ethical way to manufacture physical goods as a designer today? The crucial distinction with Coven is that, at a remarkably tender stage in her artistic journey, she is entirely willing to grapple with these difficult issues out in the open. The resulting work is thoughtfully considered, deeply intelligent, and compulsively compelling.
