Sculptural Furniture Exploring Bold Geometries

“I’m not a ceramicist.” It is a curious statement from a designer whose practice has been so deeply shaped by clay.

But for Rino Claessens, the distinction matters. He is less interested in ceramics as a tradition to master than as a material to question. What happens when an established technique is pushed in another direction? What if a limitation becomes a starting point? His work grows from this interrogation—challenging familiar processes and searching for forms that might not otherwise exist.

Based in Eindhoven, Claessens graduated from the Public & Private department at Design Academy Eindhoven. His studio functions as both workshop and laboratory, where ideas are tested through making and the material itself can shape the outcome. His graduation project, Scraped Earth, explored this approach through an unconventional process of scraping clay over an interior mould, leaving the traces of making visible in the finished forms.

Some of the most beautiful stories in design begin with leaving what is familiar behind. For Claessens, one came in Arita, Japan, where he spent six months immersed in centuries-old porcelain culture. Rather than arriving with a fixed idea, he began by looking, studying and learning. The experience expanded his understanding of ceramics—not simply as a tradition, but as a material full of possibilities still waiting to be discovered.

It is this blurring of boundaries that makes Claessens’ practice so compelling to The Orb. His pieces move between ceramics, furniture, sculpture and architecture, retaining the intimacy of craft while beginning to behave like elements of space. A technical solution becomes a design language; a functional object becomes something more sculptural. His work invites us to look at familiar things differently.