What would Ursula do?
Ursula Futura is an alter ego. She does what she feels like doing. She has been told she is too much her whole life.
A rainbow appears from nowhere. Light hits glass and the room shifts and you stop and you stare and you feel something you can't explain. And you don't want to. That's where Ursula begins. That's why she makes anything at all.
She blows glass by mouth in Vienna. She made a vessel called NESSIE because it lumbers through a room the way something enormous and gentle moves through deep water. She made a lamp called PULSAR because pulsars are real and surreal at the same time. She made a dish called PHANTOM because once you see it, you can't un-see it.
Every piece comes out different. She thinks that's the whole point.
Ursula Futura is for the people who are also too much. Too enthusiastic, too weird, too in love with the moment a rainbow appears from a piece of glass on a Tuesday afternoon for absolutely no reason at all. This is for everyone who has ever been told they are too much. And refused to believe it.
Kathrin, off-duty
I am Kathrin. I live in Vienna. I founded Ursula Futura because I needed somewhere to put the version of me that gets too excited about a colour, a shape, a piece of glass catching the afternoon.
Ursula is me when I stop editing. When I stop softening. When I stop making the polite version of the thing.
I spent years being told I was too much. I no longer find that interesting feedback.
Everything here is something I couldn't stop thinking about. That's the only reason we make anything.
Come say hello kathrin@ursulafutura.com
Write to me about anything.
Commissions, collabs, the colour you can't get out of your head, the object you want but haven't described yet.
I read everything.
How the magic happens
Glass is a liquid pretending to be a solid. When it's hot, it remembers what it actually is. The glassblower blows into a pipe, the material moves, a NESSIE or a PHANTOM appears, and then it cools and forgets.
That's where every Ursula Futura piece comes from. Bohemia, a furnace, a breath, a pipe and a person willing to commit to a shape that will never exist again.
The little bubbles? Those are the material arguing back. We leave them in.
