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In the Race to Take the Blahs Out of Corporate Office Design, Suzanne Tick is Beating the Clock
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When Suzanne Tick isn’t running her own consulting and design firm in SoHo, serving as creative director for Knoll Textiles, or designing woven carpets with her partner and new husband at Tuva Looms, she’s with her 7-year-old son, Gabriel.
“We play on the beach, we draw, we watch the sunset, and we paint shells,” says Tick. During one such mother-son bonding experience, she bought Gabriel a new pair of tennis shoes with mesh on them. The little boy looked at his mother and said that it would make a great fabric. “We’re presently close to getting a mill that can transfer it to furnishings,” she says.
Tick, who originally attended the University of Iowa to become a printmaker, fell in love with textiles after one weaving class. “I didn’t want to work in fashion because I was too intimidated for that,” explains Tick, who recalled her parents’ interior design magazines and decided to move East to create fabrics for commercial use.
Her first job was working at the mill for Boris Kroll. For seven years, Tick learned from the father of contemporary contract fabrics. “I remember the first drawing that I did and the fabric. It was called ‘Summer Storm.’ It was multi-colored and it was a combination of organic and geometric shapes.”
This idea of integrating nature with something man-made is still the foundation for Tick’s fabric designs. “They’re very natural looking even if they’re synthetic. There’s a very technical aspect whether it’s the fiber or the process. It’s a combination of technical and organic ideas and forms. And we always try to make them luxurious—that’s what we do.”
In addition to Kroll’s heavy influence, Tick finds a lot of inspiration from Japan through Yohji Yamamoto’s fashion and Janichi Arai’s residential textiles. “It’s all about being contemporary and being on the next wave of technology, but also being aware of the need for luxury. And by luxury, I don’t mean expensive, I mean feeling really good. There’s a whole move toward things being soothing,” she says.
So far, Tick is most proud of being included in the Museum of Modern Art’s show “Structure and Surface: Contemporary Japanese Textiles.” The museum chose to include her experimental work made from a Japanese industrial steel fiber. Since Tick has not been able to find a mill that can properly weave the metal, she continues to weave it by hand.
From conceiving the yarn to actually producing a fabric, it can take Tick a year and half to see a finished product. “The more an artist or designer works on their work, the better it is—adding a slub to a yarn, creating color differences,” she says.
Even though Tick can remember the first time she saw one of her fabrics applied to a piece of furniture, it wasn’t until she formed the carpet company Tuva Looms with husband Terry Mowers that she had a chance to really see how a textile affects a room. “It’s allowed me for the first time to look at the whole interior because the carpet covers the whole floor.”
“Every material we’re working on speaks to its own color palette. My work isn’t about being trendy, it’s about bringing out the fabric. It’s all about the texture to me, and the colors and how they react. It’s about using warm and cool tones together to create beauty. We don’t try to create products that already exist. We try to add something to it that’s thought-provoking, another twist,” says Tick, who hopes to inspire designers with her textiles, whether it’s to dream up a new use or to incorporate a new material.
“What we try to do is elicit a response to get designers to think about how to use it. Thought provoking is definitely a good way to move things forward.”
Sometimes Tick’s innovations have prompted her to think about different uses, too. “We’ve done some experimental work that cries out to be fashion,” she says. Tick even chose to show off her transparent polyester, wool, and rayon viscose raffia wall covering by having it made into a shawl and dress.
“I don’t see myself as being the designer of garments,” says Tick. Although no longer too timid to work in fashion, Tick knows that if she’s going to be there, it will be on her terms. “I see myself more as being the designer of the fabric that may be used. So if there’s a collaborator out there. . ."
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