Jeremy Firehammer is an accomplished artist known for his sculptures, wall art and functional pieces that blend natural elements like wood and stone with the forms often seen in industrial, modern architecture. How did these two seemingly disparate elements come together? According to Jeremy, it was a byproduct of his upbringing on the shores of Lake Michigan.
“Being next to the sand dunes, ravines and big canopies of trees, a lot of the limestone you see in my work kind of reminds me of the dunes I grew up on,” he said. “But then, as you got out of the dunes, it was very close to Chicago. So a lot of the architecture you see in my work is reflections of the skyline of the big city––a lot of factory and industrial architecture.”
While walnut, slate and limestone make regular appearances in Jeremy’s work, he also strives to find extremely rare materials like the Brazilian marble wood he recently incorporated into a sculptural, yet functional table. In addition to meticulously selecting the right materials for each piece, he’s also developed a labor-intensive method that involves hand cutting, shaping, polishing and setting stone, wood and steel into distinct, asymmetrically balanced designs.
“My work has a slight Asian look to it in terms of how I divide up the canvas, but there’s also a Frank Lloyd Wright influence,” Jeremy said.
Growing up in the Midwest also exposed Jeremy to much of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture and that was part of the reason he moved West––to study architecture in a locale that had a Frank Lloyd Wright presence: Arizona. Though he started out his college journey studying architecture, Jeremy eventually ended up in the fine arts program at Arizona State University. Still, it’s easy to see these two passions––art and architecture––come together in his work.
“[Taliesen West] was part of the reason I came out here to go to school,” he said. “I went to ASU for architecture, but ended up in the school of fine arts, which I appreciated and felt I had a little more freedom.”
More recently, Jeremy has exercised that freedom through a collaboration with Maria and Ekaterina Yaschuk, the duo behind the LED wallpaper studio Meystyle. In this new, limited series of three atmospheric lighting works of art, they seamlessly blended wood and stone with a canvas of natural, hand-painted fibers and dotted it with embedded crystals and stunning LED lighting.
“It creates two different pieces,” Jeremy said. “One without the light in which you see more of the crystals, and the dimensions of the stone and wood. Then, with the lights on, it captures a whole other imagination. We’re really implementing a lot of different techniques and materials.”