First day in Copenhagen, we headed to the DESIGNER ZOO gallery in Vesterbrogade to buy gifts for our family. This is a design and craft gallery. All pieces on sale are made by Danish or guest designers and artisans. When we walked in, I immediately recognised the work being installed in the front rooms of Designer Zoo as being by the renowned Tzuri Gueta, a textile designer from Paris. I approached the director of the gallery and asked him about the exhibition and in the course of the conversation he told me that Tzuri was in the gallery (there were quite a few people in the space bumping in the exhibition) - he pointed him out to me. I went over to Tzuri, introduced myself, and told him that I knew his work, and because he is a designer in his own right who collaborates with Haute Couture fashion designers such as Karl Lagerfeld and Jean-Paul Gaultier, he had been on my 'radar' to interview (told him that I had interviewed Annie Trussart, the Artistic Director at Montex on one of my trips to Paris). He invited me to come to his atelier the next time I am in Paris and gave me his card. I asked him if I could photograph his work for my blog and he was more than happy for me to do so.

Tzuri Gueta refers to himself as a textile designer, but he also designs jewellery and art objects. In his search for new technologies in textile design, he came upon silicone and invented a technique of blowing silicone into lace or open weave materials. He patented this technique in 2005 and it is now his signature material. The director of the gallery told me that Tzuri is a passionate scuba diver which explains why his textiles appear to reference underwater scenes and his jewellery and objects look like sea creatures or coral. Tzuri told me that all the pieces are handworked. He has other designers and artisans working with him in his atelier in Paris.

Textile designed and created by Tzuri Gueta

The orange substrate for the blue 'beads' of silicone is lace.