With this iteration of our newsletter, we’re kicking off something new! We’ll be interviewing some of Once–Future’s incredible collaborators working across design, art, and architecture. Through our conversations, we’ll spotlight some of our memorable projects from the recent past, and dive deeper into the specialized work of our peers. For this first edition, we spoke with Quincy Ellis of Facture Studio, a design studio in Brooklyn working in molded resin. When it came to designing the amenity signage for the new Buffalo AKG Art Museum, we knew we wanted to use a material that felt special—an unexpected contrast to the rest of the new signage system’s high-polish stainless steel and grayscale color palette. We hoped to create bright beacons, guiding visitors into communal spaces like the museum shop, cafe, and Creative Commons, situated in the renovated Town Square, a free public space. Inspired by resin furniture and objects, we were drawn to the play of color and translucency in the material and the way light brings it to life. Hoping to combine resin, LEDs, and custom typography—but not knowing what was possible—we turned to Quincy and Facture to fill in the blanks.  

Once–Future

Hi, Quincy! Thanks for doing this. We’d love to start the conversation by having you introduce the work you did with Once–Future for the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

• Above: An early resin block test for the AKG amenity signs

Quincy Ellis

Yes. Where to begin? From start to finish, the project spanned more than 3 years, including COVID, so it’s been quite the journey. From the beginning, there was a clear vision about using the translucent qualities of resin while still making readable signage. With resin, there’s a color-shifting thing that happens when light moves through it. When illuminated, it gives a beautiful, soft, hazy glow to things. But this also means that it’s not so good for legibility. The tricky part was all the technicalities of figuring it out.

O–F

Your studio, Facture, often works in furniture design. Was signage new territory for you?

QE

Yes. I mostly create tables, side tables, wall works, mirrors. I have dabbled in lighting before, but in a very ephemeral kind of way. This was my first time trying to make something legible. Threading the needle between the two was very cool.

O–F

For people who are unfamiliar with resin as a material, could you tell us a bit more about it? How’d this practice start for you?

QE

I grew up in Philadelphia near the Wissahickon Creek, which is a small river that runs through a park. I spent a lot of my time fishing, walking through, and swimming in this body of water. I was always most interested in what was going on underneath the surface of the water—peering into this transparent material. You could tell the depth of the water by the color and the sediment—it would change color as it got deeper. I went to a design high school, and I wanted to make something out of clear material. It was obviously outside of my skill level when I was in high school, but I stayed interested in this childhood fascination with transparency. I thought about using water inside of a container. I went to RISD for industrial design, so I’ve studied a lot of engineering, chemicals, and design—how things work. But I didn’t have the opportunity to work with resin because it’s usually too toxic to use in a communal space. After school, I started working in high-end art fabrication at one of the best places in New York. At the time, my boss was known for taking on crazy projects—but one thing he would never take on was clear resin casting. Way too difficult. So, there’s the challenge. I started just playing around with different types of resin, did some projects for people, and learned about the limitations of what resin can do. After I got comfortable with it, I started my own resin furniture company, using the pitfalls and the problems that can happen with resin to inform my design practice and try to eliminate as many variables as possible.

• Above: Collection of Facture works via Tuleste Factory, photo by Matthew Gordon @matthewgordonstudio

O–F

Can you explain the difficulties of the material?

• Left: Color and opacity testing

• Right: Final amenity signs in the shop before getting shipped up to Buffalo

QE

So, the difficulty of working with resin is it undergoes an extremely temperamental chemical process. If there’s too much heat or too little heat—or it’s not mixed properly—it does a lot of wacky things. It’s kind of like baking, but 10 times harder. Not much is repeatable about resin unless you have the exact same conditions every single time—like the relative moisture, the heat, how it was mixed in the factory—and sometimes the manufacturer changes things in the chemical makeup of the resin that makes it suddenly react differently. It’s just a very temperamental thing to work with, especially if you want to make it clear and not have any bubbles, which is extremely difficult. And it’s ridiculously toxic. You need a large facility, ventilation, and proper equipment. It’s a steep bar for entry.

O–F

Considering the toxicity, how do you work with it?

• Above: Quincy at work in his Brooklyn studio

QE

I’ve always been allergic to epoxy resin since the first day I tried it. So that’s the resin I choose to work with, for some reason. It’s the least toxic resin, and it has the best physical properties. But it is very tricky to work with. I use a resin that’s 30% recycled carbon, so it’s technically a bio-based resin of the highest quality. The material that I made the AKG signs out of, though, is completely archival—resin made for things that need to stay the same color for a very long time. But if you touch archival resin and then touch your eyes, you will go blind. It’s ultra-toxic. But, of course, when cast it becomes inert, so it’s safe. We use Tyvek suits and full-face masks. We have a special plastic-lined room where we do all our resin casting to make sure no fumes escape. We have a huge ventilation system. It takes a lot of space, a lot of money, and a lot of care. You always change your gloves to prevent contamination. We go through thousands and thousands of gloves to keep everyone safe. Plastic is terrible, but if you never throw it away, it’s the most sustainable thing you can use because it’ll never degrade. If it’s heirloom-quality, plastic will last forever.

O–F

No single use here. Can you talk a little more about color in your work?

• Above: Ripple Table by Facture Studio

QE

What I do at Facture Studio is design in three-dimensional color. I view resin as a medium for me to play with color. I create color gradients by suspending pigment in different layers of resin on top of another structural material. You can see how light moves through this clear medium to illuminate the color.

O–F

Yeah, it has an almost milky quality to it. Is that how would you describe it?

QE

Yeah, like hazy, milky. I do some things where the pigment in the resin hides an internal structure in the piece—until it doesn’t. So, for example, you could have another, separate form inside the overall structure that emerges through the resin. There’s a lot of fine-tuning the amount of pigment to make these visual things happen in the material.

O–F

It’s interesting to think about what’s actually underneath the resin—so many of your pieces feel like solid blocks of this beautiful color, height, and form.

• Above: 2-Way Shift Box in Red/Purple by Facture Studio

QE

I don’t actually use a lot of resin. It’s economical and safe. It also makes the pieces not weigh like 1,000 pounds.

O–F

Makes sense!

QE

No one else does it this way. It’s always solid blocks of resin that are like two inches or three inches thick. But when you’re working with light going through resin, it throws a lot of that experience out the window. If you have a bright light going through the resin, like an LED, the light source blinds you against the pigment color. The challenge with the AKG signs was to make the color read but blend it out from the edges of the letters, so that there’s a gradient from the blown-out white of the LEDs to the darker resin color. This process is so different from how I usually work with resin. But, in a way, I’m still using a technique to make a gradient color—just using a light source instead of pigment.

O–F

Because the AKG project was such a change from your normal technique, how did you approach the design process? Was there a lot of trial and error?

QE

A lot of it was playing around and doing a bunch of tests. We ended up changing the design of the signage quite a bit. Originally, we wanted it to be 100% resin—which just gave us letters that we couldn’t read. So, we ended up creating solid white letters and using color around them. We added an extra half-an-inch of clear resin on top of the letters for depth. The effect was crisp lettering that also had this eerie glow around the edges. It’s a complicated stack of light playing through four or five different parameters.

O–F

How did you feel about working with type?

QE

I’m usually always working with soft things, so the legible text was fun—something I think I might use in the future in some way, shape, or form. But actually making the text was difficult—we had to laser cut acrylic, use molds, and sand each figure to the same height, making sure all the facets were super clean and didn’t have any bubbles in them. A lot of this involved very small sanding. The “O” and the “G” were really challenging. The “A” was especially hard. The interior of the “A” took someone, like, two days to sand. I learned a lot about what resin can do and how light works from this project. I think it really informs the rest of my practice in terms of what I think can be done with resin and transparency. 

O–F

On that note, any new takeaways about resin that you learned?

QE

It’s real finicky with heat. There was a lot of shrinking, contracting, and contouring that the resin did which was unexpected in its severity.

O–F

And that warping was happening because of the LEDs?

QE

Well, resin naturally likes to shrink, so it creates tension. My pieces don’t usually have that problem because I’m pouring a different type of resin over a solid object. But for AKG, these were free floating blocks.

O–F

Hollow blocks.

QE

Yes, that must stay hollow as they’re being poured, which was more complicated than I thought.

O–F

The way you’re describing the resin—it feels very much alive, with the shrinking and how sensitive it is. How it reacts in unpredictable ways.

QE

Resin’s always seen as a very stable material that doesn’t react to anything. Chemically, that’s true. But in the process of making it, it gets pretty wacky. Sometimes it’s cool. Sometimes it’s not so fun. A lot of working with resin is like, “Oh, why isn’t this working?” It’s kind of a nightmare. But the payoff is always like, “Oh, wow, now it works after struggling through!”

O–F

Are there other materials you’re thinking of incorporating into your resin practice, or anything you’re curious about?

QE

There’s always a temptation to put stuff underneath the resin, and to swirl resin colors together. Which is really cool looking. But I can’t do it. We have a CNC, we have prototyping, 3D printing, and we could make intricate patterns underneath the resin. But it seems too easy somehow. And maybe too decorative. I prefer keeping it minimal and just about the color, and how colors transition.

O–F

Seeing the AKG signs for the first time, the scale was really striking—especially the “Creative Commons” sign, which is the largest. I mean, you spec it, you know the height, but it’s different in person.

QE

I think when we got the steel backing plate for the “Creative Commons” sign, we were trying to keep it at like 50 pounds or something. I weighed the piece of steel, and it was 35 pounds. And the resin weighs double that. I think I had scale shock at that point.

O–F

At the beginning, we were imagining these signs as monolithic blocks. It was so educational for us to learn about your method, and the way you use discrete layers of resin. I remember with color-testing, we had envisioned a muted beige color for one of the signs. When we got a color-block test for it, it turned out to look very rubbery and latex-y—because we just weren’t familiar with the nature of resin. Plus, with the LEDs, the color experience is very singular. They go from a milk-glass when the lights are off, to a more candy-like color when lit.

QE

This is a little nerdy, but visually what’s happening is when the light is off, you’re seeing light bounce off the clear resin finish. But when the light is on, you’re looking at the light coming through it, instead. The light dynamics change completely when the light is on. Instead of looking at the surface, you start looking much farther into the piece. Your eye focuses on a different point.

O–F

It looks beautiful both ways.

QE

It was important that they looked good without being lit, as well.

O–F

This project was particularly fun because of the balance between having a functional sign and still merging that with your practice. Just having that playful interaction of function, beauty, and art—and signage being part of that conversation, too.

QE

I was also always thinking about weight, and how they could be hung. A lot of the design decisions I made were all around trying to keep the weight down while still making sure there’s enough room inside for all the LEDs. There were a lot of different things I was trying to juggle within a set dimension. Trying to make everything happen within that box monolith that we’re talking about.

• Above: AKG shop sign, photo by Magda Biernat

O–F

What are you working on now?

QE

We’re working on a blue resin console, and I’m also working on another scale console for a show coming up. There’s a 12-foot dining table with a custom free-handed sawtooth pattern along the edges. The mold has to be installed on every single facet of that table before we cast the resin, so I will be using some of my letter finishing techniques on that. I have this problem where if I make something for someone else—and maybe this is my art fabricator background—I never want to use it in my own work. It’s sacred. When you’re working for an artist, they’re trusting you to live in their head and produce a work as they would. There’s trust. I would never use the exact technique that I used for the AKG signs again, even though it is a way to mix typography and resin. It’s not something I would repeat.

O–F

Any other big projects coming down the pipeline you want to plug?

QE

I show with Tuleste Factory in Chelsea, and they’re showing at Design Miami this December. I’ll be making a few pieces for that—which is only four weeks from now, so I gotta hurry up!

O–F

Cool, we’ll keep an eye out. Thanks, Quincy!

• Above: TONE collection shown by Tuleste Factory