Brush Stool by Anna Liubimova for Sestra is a memory of care held in aluminium and wax. Its starting point is an ordinary intimacy: sitting while another person brushes your hair. A shallow, curved seat rests above a sequence of vertical planes, giving the familiar outline of a comb an architectural scale. Seen at an angle, the supports separate into slender fins; from another position, they close into a denser body. The form gathers and loosens as you move around it, with air and shadow occupying the intervals.

The memory behind the stool is blurred, its atmosphere more persistent than its details. “The material had to behave the way memory behaves,” Liubimova explains. Across the aluminium, brush marks travel in different directions, breaking reflections into fragments. The room enters the surface without settling into a complete image. Light spreads softly across the planes, then catches at an edge. Within this shifting surface, the comb remains recognisable, a clear outline carrying an indistinct recollection.

Finding that balance required a measured process of removal. Liubimova stripped away the particular people and circumstances of the original gesture, allowing the association to become someone else’s. The silhouette retains enough familiarity to invite recognition, while leaving its meaning open. Each element had to justify its presence through what it held of the initial idea. “If I remove this, does the object still ask the same question? If yes, it goes.” Reduction becomes a way of preserving the feeling as its description falls away.

That restraint depends on exact construction. The junction between the curved seat and its supports demanded close alignment; an early prototype arrived with industrial fixings whose prominence altered the character of the whole. Further development quietened those connections, bringing attention back to the thin edges, repeated intervals and narrow separation between the seat’s two layers. Aluminium offers durability and a weight suited to movement, alongside its unsettled reflections. Some smaller components are reclaimed, their earlier lives becoming indistinguishable after polishing. The surface can carry marks and be worked back, giving renewal a material presence.

The finished stool returns the idea to the body. It offers somewhere to sit at a height that allows another person to reach, quietly making room for the gesture that began it. Its precise geometry leaves the encounter unwritten. “It needs to hold a place open, and you bring what goes in it,” Liubimova says. Between the coolness of the material and the closeness of that invitation, Brush Stool allows an overlooked act of care to remain present.

europe

SESTRÁ

Riccardo Biagioni Angeli

Photography 

Ruben Iskander Hilkens

Bogdan Shirokov

Furniture

aluminium

Brush Stool by Anna Liubimova for Sestra is a memory of care held in brushed aluminum. Its comb-like silhouette recalls the quiet intimacy of someone brushing your hair.

Brush Stool

Stool

Cvetan Koceski  


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