Idiots — Meet Afke Golsteijn and Floris Bakker

First I heard of them was in Janice Blackburn's August 9, 2008 Financial Times profile.

Long story short: Both Dutch, they're artists whose multidisciplinary sculptures blur design, craft and storytelling and employ whatever's at hand, no matter how bizarre or seemingly inappropriate.

I like that.

The Financial Times piece follows.

The stuff of dreams and magic

Afike Golstein and Floris Bakker are happy if you call them Idiots. It is the name of their creative partnership, taken from a cartoon character who appealed to their irreverent sense of humour.

Otherwise, the couple — also partners in life — dislike being labelled. "We never make a product. We are not commercial," Bakker rem-arks. But they reluctantly admit: "we have a good nose for trends and providing inspiration for others; our goal is to remain timeless".

Their multi-disciplinary sculptural pieces, a blur between design and craft, go way beyond the most radical boundaries of the newly coined "designart".

Golstein refers to herself as "the one with the crazy ideas" while Bakker is "the smart one". As inventors and creators, they are breaking new ground, pooling and sharing combined skills and talents such as embroidery, ceramics, jewellerymaking, glassmaking and ironmongery. She explains: "Our theme is nature, technology and capitalism and the big issue for designers such as ourselves is how to remain authentic and, at the same time, survive." Taxidermy is central in their creations — a way of visually expressing their real and imaginary worlds through three-dimensional story-telling.

The couple met when they were 18 at their graduation ceremony from the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. For such an unconventional pair, Golstein's description of how their eyes met "and it was love at first sight" is charmingly old-fashioned. It was the late 1990s. "That was when the whole adventure started," she says.

Bakker grew up in Amstel, a small village near Amsterdam, where his father still runs a print shop and his brother is an art therapist working with autistic adults. Golstein was raised by her single mother in the seamier part of Amsterdam. It was a tough life as they had no home of their own and moved from place to place, squatting in other people's houses. What most children regarded as hobbies (making up stories and caring for animals), she now believes "was a way of showing reality in my somewhat surreal existence. The question of reality is one that I will work with for a long time".

The couple dream of buying a farm one day; in the meantime Bakker makes the iron constructions integral to their work at the forge he built on a dairy farm in Ouderkerk, just outside Amsterdam.

Now in their mid-30s, Golstein and Bakker have an endless stream of new ideas and directions for their work. Post-degree studies (some taken at night classes) that include photography, theatre design, jewellerymaking, fashion, and, in Bakker's case, business administration have spanned several years.

Friends support their artistic ambitions and strange requirements. When, for example, a cat belonging to a friend recently died he took the corpse to Golstein and Bakker to store in their deep freeze before taking it to their taxidermist. They play with visual ideas and possibilities much as a set designer might do. Mummified creatures take centre stage in their creations in spite of the bureaucratic challenges they face. Dead birds found in fields or on the streets have to be taken to the police, forms have to be filled in verifying the date and location they were found, and a signed letter of authorisation must be presented to the taxidermist before he is permitted to commence his work.

In 2003 the couple started making large-scale sculptural pieces, which they put on their website and sold themselves rather than going through galleries. It was a risky decision but they felt they need- ed to take control of what they did and also that galleries might not respect the fragility of their work.

Interior designers from all over Europe offered them commissions. "Ophelia", a lioness with gilded nuggets of handmade ceramics — fabricated at the European Ceramic Workshop — oozing from its body, was bought for €40,000 by the National Museum of Oslo.

"It was a start," they say, and the money enabled them to make their next large piece, "Corpse Bride", an iron construction comprising a stuffed vulture adorned with pearls and embroidered textiles. They regard the money they make as a means to financing the next ambitious project, such as "This Seat", in which a peacock wearing an embroidered silk skirt nonchalantly sweeps the floor from the arm of a high-backed tapestry chair. Now in a private collection in Kuwait, the piece might start a new trend for decadent decorative arts.

Bakker says that they would like to do more public works but, at the moment, these are still dreams: "We need more space and more money. But we carry on. Our inspiration is life, friends and what we see going on around us."

In a era where minimalism is the cool face of interior design, Golstein and Bakker are modern day Salvador Dalís and Merit Oppenheims, bravely creating a material, disturbing world and luring us in to share its magic.