Imagine a concrete jungle – if that jungle were filled with rich color and curving contours. That’s the vision of Hardly Soft’s boldly sculptural furniture, decorative items, and art pieces that represent Jessica Vogel Brown’s long held fascination with textural contrast.
As an undergraduate, Vogel Brown switched her major from archaeology to visual arts, ending up in a sculpture class only because the painting class was full. She fell for sculpture and gravitated toward concrete, creating works in which she embedded sand-filled fabric, highlighting the contrast between hard and soft, planting the seed for her eventual brand.
“Concrete is so durable, such an amazing material, that it can last forever, basically,” says Vogel Brown. “So having the ability to transform to carve it, cast it, make it hard, soft, to etch it, polish it… it was the perfect material for me because I could get all my ideas out in this one very environmentally durable material.”
During the pandemic, Vogel Brown was looking to beautify her backyard and began experimenting with concrete furniture, creating stunning pieces that could stand up to the oppressive outdoor environment of south Louisiana or stand out in a living room.
Vogel Brown notes the influence of her grandparents’ adobe-style home out west, with stones embedded in the walls, and a personal passion for rock collecting nurtured by her grandmother. Many pieces she makes today also feature embedded natural stones or glass (which she sources locally from Glass Half Full) as well as rich pigments, pushing back on the idea of concrete as a brutalist, industrial material.
“I find concrete actually pretty feminine because it’s like water,” she says. “It can move in organic ways, it feels very natural, you can see shift in movement in the concrete as it dries.”
Vogel Brown’s work can be found through the Hardly Soft website and Instagram, and she will appear at several holiday markets this season (showcasing smaller works like trays, candleholders, and planters). For Vogel Brown, the universe for her “functional pieces of art” is ever expanding: “There’s so much I want to do… I still have a lot of ideas.”
Contact
hardly-soft.com, @hardly.soft.concrete
