“The hardest line to walk may be that between craft and design - unless you are Jim Zivic of Burning Relic. Zivic understands craft as a process of making, not an aesthetic, and design as a conceptual framework, not a particular practice. In his case, the framework embraces sources as diverse as Joseph Beuy’s sculpture and Civil War campaign furniture.

Spare but not spartan, Zivic’s furniture is elemental and sensual at the same time. Coal, rubber, leather, and steel are the palette of raw materials he transforms into functional furnishings with minimal intervention. Anthracite blocks are carved and polished; raw Malaysian rubber is cut and stacked; leather panels are seamed and stapled. The result is a suite of tables, seats, and floor coverings that seem both familiar and new. The typical geography of materials in the domestic setting has been redrawn. In Jim Zivic’s world you can find yourself literally sitting on flooring or stacking your books on a big rock.

At his farm in upstate New York, he shapes side tables out of coal monoliths taken from Pennsylvania mines. Zivic carves the anthracite blocks with diamond saws, sanding and finishing them to varying degrees, from matte to mirror. He fabricates stools with seats of linked leather, welding their armatures in delicate lines of steel. The lids of baby pianos are deployed as table tops or loveseats. In a music studio for Lou Reed, Zivic brings all the elements together with off-beat elegance.

Call it post-industrial, call it personal; Zivic’s work is rooted in childhood collections of arrowheads and a contemporary do-it-yourself ethos. Absent is the preciousness and pretension of art furniture. Present is a design sensibility that locates luxury in materials but deflects their latent kitsch with a disciplined modesty of form.”