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Anne Brandhøj is a Danish artist and designer whose practice centers around sustainability. From sourcing and harvesting timber to drying, processing, and finishing each piece by hand, her distinct designs take form around the natural irregularities of each length of wood. Its grain, knots, splits, and coloration guide her decisions and remain as elements of the final work. Rather than imposing her creative ideas on the material, Brandhøj works with the chance variations offered by nature, allowing her to incorporate offcuts that might otherwise end up as waste. Their unique textures and patterning are highlighted, polished into delicate eddies and currents that reveal the innate beauty of the material, whether made from oakwood, walnut, Douglas fir, cherry, or beech. In addition to her playful functional objects, she creates large-scale sculptures whose undulating vertical forms reiterate abstract motifs as though materializing the movement of sound—its waves, ripples, and echoes.
“I die a little bit inside every time I see furniture with a smooth surface where you cannot see any structure, any knot, anything at all,” says Brandhøj. “It’s a shame when there is so much beauty in the wood to show.”
Brandhøj received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in furniture design from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She is a founding partner of Bly Studio, and currently serves as a teaching assistant at The Royal Academy. Brandhøj has exhibited throughout Denmark and internationally. In 2022, she was commissioned by Designmuseum Danmark to create a permanent sculptural installation for the museum, in collaboration with the Kay Bojesen Foundation.
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[…] Anne Brandhøj joined us to talk about her work in wood, on view at Hostler Burrows. Educated as a furniture designer, she became interested in where the wood she used came from. Upon visiting a saw mill, she learned about the process of cutting down wood to planks and decided to learn this as her final process. She emphasizes that you do not know what you have until you open up a tree to see what’s inside. These days, her process includes harvesting the trees she uses for each piece. To learn more, listen to the complete interview. […]