The Centre Is Everywhere

8 years ago, we designed the Gravity Bowl. It is a simple piece: a grid that is warped, a simple abstraction of the gravitational pull of a heavenly body. It really speaks to people, it has been one of our top 5 bestsellers now for the last 5 years, we thought it was time to take a step back and try and understand how the piece speaks to people, and what it says.

Gravity isn't what we thought. It's more like memory, the way it warps the fabric of space and time. The way the past bends around massive objects, creating wells where even light falls in and never escapes.

I remember reading about gravitational waves at the Staatsbibliothek, thinking about how space itself ripples like a vanilla pudding on a rickety table. How these waves carry echoes of ancient collisions across billions of light years, arriving here as whispers of events we'll never witness first-hand. There's something uniquely childish about our relationship with gravity - the way we simultaneously respect and defy it.

We build skyscrapers in earthquake zones. We send rockets through the atmosphere. We pretend, in our infinite capacity for self-delusion, that we can escape it.

But gravity remains constant. It curves back on itself in endless cycles, bending space into loops that might, for all we know, connect the beginning of time to its end. In physics, as in life, everything returns.

We are all falling, all the time, in curves we can calculate but never quite comprehend. Gravity at the Centre Pompidou Gravity really took off after it we started selling it at the Boutique du Centre Pompidou. When we first launched the product it was avilable in mirror polished steel only.

Our beloved Fariba at Boutique du Centre Pompidou asked for a bespoke version that was exclusive to her (exclusive within France only, there are limits to every love). We split the grid in X and Y axis, giving each axis a strong colour that we associate with the iconic Piano & Rogers building. The X axis has a naive and hopeful baby blue, and the Y axis has a strong red with a very slight orange tone.

The result is a tray that is a different colour depending on the angle from which it is seen. Our other (also very much loved) French retailers were subsequently upset that they couldn't get their hands on a bi-colour gravity. For them, we developed the black/white and magenta/brass version.

At our recent photoshoot with Florian Hetz, we explored how the rigid lines of the piece contrast with the softer lines of the human body. Long-time Fundamentalist and first-time model Oli Kossowski was asked to react to the piece in any way he felt like and this dialogue bewteen human and grid was captured perfectly by Hetz. We really love the shots that came out of this shoot, some of them ending up a little too intimate for wide release.

In the end, though, it was the fruit and not the human skin that was doing the heavy lifting in terms of innuendo. GRAVITY - CENTREPIECE - MAGENTA & BRASS GRAVITY - CENTREPIECE - BLACK & WHITE GRAVITY - TRAY - MAGENTA & BRASS GRAVITY - TRAY - BLACK & WHITE GRAVITY - PEN HOLDER GRAVITY - TRAY - SPECTRUM GRAVITY - CENTREPIECE - POMPIDOU GRAVITY - TRAY - POMPIDOU GRAVITY - TRAY