Page 54 - S/ Fall 2022

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Resin Heaven
Don’t let the candy hues and playful shapes fool you: Ian Alistair Cochran’s solid resin works demonstrate a mastery of medium.
By Jaclyn Tersigni
W here are the bubbles? That’s usually the first question Chicago- based designer Ian Alistair Cochran gets when fellow makers
encounter his sculptural furniture and objects made from solid, vividly hued resin. Resin is a demanding material, one that’s difficult to cast and tricky to cure. Air bubbles become trapped within, seemingly impossible to avoid and marring the final product.
Unless you’re Cochran. His tables, shelves, and stools—rendered in candy and jewel tones, Jeff Koons–like in their playful shapeliness, notched together without adhesives or fasteners—boast perfect clarity. It’s the result of years spent mastering the medium.
“It’s not like pouring water into a cup, where it’s going to be clear and then I’m going to take it out of the cup and it’s going to be clear,” Cochran says. “I’m working from the back to avoid all the headaches that this material has. Then I try to design from there.”
For some designers, those headaches might be reason enough to pursue a different material muse. For Cochran, a deep fascination with materiality is the whole point. It’s what brought him to the Kansas City Art Institute, where he trained as a sculptor after high school.
“I had always liked working physically with things and different materials, manipulating them and dealing with three-dimensionality,” says Cochran, 31. “That kind of carried through my sculpture program.”
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