Samantha Freeman

Samantha Freeman Design Studio, Philadelphia

 Anemone Pin

One could argue that Samantha Freeman’s pin is an ode to nature—specifically, tropical flowers, for which Freeman has an affinity, and clown fish that are found on the tropical beaches the designer loves. She also loves to scuba dive, compiling beautiful imagery in her brain to access the rich palette during the process of design. Freeman is a fan of symmetry and repetition; she says, “One piece often leads to the next and the next, building on each other as well as their original inspiration.” That’s what happened when she was designing her Anemone Pin. Freeman constructed the pin’s three-dimensional pieces by repeating planes around an axis. She wanted to keep the pin light, and the repeating planes, which define the space and create an illusion of volume, offer a way to create a 3-D form that is not too heavy. The “frill” was inspired by a tropical flower from Maui called a pincushion, as well as by the beautiful anemones she saw while diving in the South Pacific. “There are things in nature that are so perfect and so beautiful that they stay with you like a touchstone to design. I am often amazed by the perfect symmetry in nature, repetitive forms that create the whole. Sometimes mimicking this repetition, a piece becomes more than the sum of its parts. That is when a design becomes successful.”