Brooke M Davis Portrait

About

Brooke M Davis Design is an Artist, Designer, and Professor of Design. She has been making and teaching for the last 20 years.


College for Creative Studies 1994-1999
Bachelors of Fine Art- Photography

Purdue University 2002-2004
Master’s of Industrial Design


“I have been drawing and making since I was a child. In my early years at art school, I pursued photography where I really began to explore shooting figures and flowers to understand how light and shadow can evoke emotion in the form when void of looking at a face. At the time Joyce Tennyson and Robert Mapplethorpe were very influential in my explorations. To me there is a very organic and sensual overlap in form between figures and flowers and they explored this masterfully. Later, as I discovered my love for making and furniture design, I was awestruck by the art nouveau movement and the gorgeous organic forms that emerged from it as built objects. Objects that brought beauty from the natural world to a constructed one. So naturally, the early influences of figures, flowers and the art nouveau movement can be seen in my furniture designs as they have matured in form and craftsmanship over the years.

It was in grad school that I discovered the CNC machine and became fascinated with the idea of the machine as an extension of the hand. What else can I do with it? A question that has lead me to a lifetime pursuit of challenging myself with innovative ways to integrate industrial fabrications techniques in the the working process. A process by which design methods are applied but the output can best be described as art”

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Design + Process

Fine craftsmanship comes from getting your hands dirty. When concepting a piece, the feel of the work is integral to the design. I often work through my designs by going back and forth between drawing, sculpting in clay, digitally modeling in the computer , and prototyping with a CNC machine. While the CNC is often integral to producing the final objects, all machine marks are meticulously removed so that the design and craftsmanship can be fully appreciated.