F  L  A  U  N  T

Porky Hefer, based in France, creates the next wave of natural living, human nests. No, they aren’t replicas of bird nests. Instead, they are intricately designed, hand-weaved, sustainable cocoons that allow the buyer to escape from the outside world. Much like a nest, Hefer’s designs surround you, cutting off your sense of sight from the outside world, giving you the chance to self-reflect and enter “some other sort of zone of pleasure and experience.” His technique resembles traditional techniques of weaving, aiming to elevate them.

After speaking with the South African designer, his passion for nature and getting people out of their comfort zones was very evident. In fact, Hefer was once in advertising, but broke out of the world he knew, turning to design. Moving out of corporate America and the idea that money was more important than the products being sold, he ventured into “goodvertising,” the craft of encouraging clients to contribute to good causes (i.e. fixing up schools) instead of advertising. It was made clear, however, that people were more worried about spending budgets than contributing to bettering the world, so Hefer invested his time in design.

Nests stuck with Porky, allowing him to use whatever surrounded him to create a strong “safe space” for people. His nest disappear in nature, breaking down over time like sustainable products should. Read below to see what Hefer has to say about his nest-making practice!

What got you into nest-making?

I can't remember a time when I didn't have a bedroom with a tree outside with a mass of [weaverbirds] doing their little dance and making their weaving and the sort of love triangles and stories that go on, so it was always something that was above me. I would be away on a weekend, and I was not in the design world, and I was looking at things sort of differently. Then it was like, I was lying in a hammock, and I looked up, and there was a palm tree with all of them, and I said, ‘You know, I've gotta use this in something.’ Then, like, 2 seconds later, it solidified as an idea. Then I went to Johannesburg Art Fair in 2009. It was an art fair, I hadn't done any design before in any show or anything like that... Now we were coming into this sort of Palace of Art where people would be highly critical about it for the first time, so I've got pictures of my advertising brand. I've got pictures of past shows that I had for the art fair, and then I realized that there was the lower section, which was all the the stands, and then there was this massive gap to the roof. And it's because they did the show on the ground and people look like this, you know, but when you came in, you came down the stairs. So I notice this huge gap and I went ‘Well I don't know, do something that fills the gap that nobody else in the in the whole show is doing’ and that just took off like crazy because it was the first thing that people saw… there was an idea about, you know when we have beds. I just thought, if we had all these empty rooms and then, suddenly, you put the bed in it, and the room disappears. I'm like, well, isn't there a better solution for that that you could keep the bed, and floor space. That's what animals do. You know that's from a wasp nest, which is in the corner of a roof like that. So you could have 10 of them on the side, sleep 10 people, but still have the entire floor space.

What is the biggest misconception people have of your designs?

I mean, one of the biggest things about my nests is when you put them outside natural, they start breaking down after like 2 years. I come in. I fix it up and then the guy will phone and say ‘Well, why is it breaking,’ and you go, well, it's natural and it's outside and you’re jumping on it. Your kid’s probably got eight friends in there. You gotta kind of understand that with every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and it's mostly like that in nature, but not when we have plastic and steel. We've made everything so that it's not like that, we can just ignore that. And I think the importance about these natural things, like I go to someone's house, and then I get a bit worried, because they're not in touch with that kind of side of things. You know, you've got to understand that everything is a delicate balance, and I think that's where humanity has gone wrong with the bottom line, where maximum profit has become the most important thing… I mean, I have one client now and he says ‘OK, we want it to last forever.’ I was like OK, then we got an issue. Then your first word is, ‘We want something organic that lasts forever.’ It kind of doesn't work. Those two lines don't work together. So if you want it to last forever, I've got a great solution. Here's the material I will use. Recycled plastic and stuff like that. To me he’s like ‘Oh no, no, no. I don't want that. I want natural and I want it to last forever.’ It's like, it doesn't last forever.

What’s the hardest material you’ve worked with? 

I think, you know one of the hardest things, the way that I work is I look for a certain system manufacturer, production system. Some like weavers. We visit in France and then I go to them. I look at the style. I look at all the different materials. I look at the different shapes. I see whether they can go in and out. You know, there's a couple of things I look for, and then I make my own frame which has got like really nothing to do with what these weavers have done before, and then I deliver this frame and I say, OK, let's go for it. Firstly, they've given me a quote for like maybe two months. OK, and I realize it's probably actually 4-5 months. So the the difficulty is trying to get people to understand that what you’re wanting is a lot more than what they've seen, and then it's fine in the beginning. And then after about a month I get a call with somebody screaming and crying saying ‘You don't know what the fuck you’re doing, what the fuck is this that you asked me to do? It's impossible, I'm giving up.’ And then you gotta go no, no, no. It's totally possible. And then I draw drawings, and I sort of get them off the edge, but just giving them little tips of how to do it 'cause I know, I've done it before, and just getting them to go past that point of wanting to give up… You know, it takes more time than they imagined, and they go like ‘No, you can't work on a piece that last four months. You must be mad.’ But at the end of it, the result is so incredible, but then this person changes into like a sort of angel going ‘Ah, we've done the best work I've ever done.’ So I think the most difficult material is the human material. Yeah, where you're trying to work with the condition, 'cause, I mean, that's why I like working with people rather than a machine. When I had to work with a computer, and they say send me a 3D, then I've gotta get on SketchUp. The quality of the product will be so bad, because I'm relying on my skills of using SketchUp, but that's not my skill. So I try to do it completely different and just try and come up with an idea that I can, then try and convince this person to do, the human. The computer says no, that's wrong. Like they say no, you’ve forgotten your password. No three tries up. It's quite negative because it's gonna protect you, whereas the human will kind of think about it and say, you know what, we can try this. We can try this or we can try that and that. 

Has the pandemic given you the opportunity to grow when it comes to your designs?

What it's really done is that it's made me question what I do and why would somebody be interested in it? Why would someone pay for it? Why would someone like it? Why would someone want it in a gallery? So it's really started making me think a lot more about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. So, instead of just experimenting, I used to do a bit of experimentation, like just going to it, and that was for the sake of experimentation. But I think everything now has to lead towards something. I mean, my biggest thing is distribution. How do we get it? How do I get these big things out in the public? If you get into my piece, you would love it. You might buy it if you see it on online, but you don't understand how big it is. So, for me, I've got a really critical problem in that. That puzzle, not being there. All these shows I did were where I made my really big sales, because, immediately when someone experienced it, they wanted. But if they're looking at it online, and they're comparing it on price and size and things like that, you're gonna go local. They're gonna end up with a little local hero, because they don't want their friends to say ‘Do you know who made that art that you just spent a lot of money on?’ So they go to local people. I think people are buying a lot more local, and that also makes me think How do I become local in France?…Now you go, ‘Really, is it worth it for me or for them?’ And you're making those decisions a lot more, so I'm finding when I contact someone and I go, hey man, ‘Don't you wanna make a 10 foot alligator that people swing in it and stuff’ and he just goes ‘You must be on drugs.’ So you've also got to come up with something that people really want to get involved in, and they gotta give up the sort of time where everyone is on this self-growth period. You don't really want to give your growth time to somebody else, it's gotta be good, so it's making me do better at presentations. Also, thinking about the French, being so intellectual and philosophical that you have to think about that… So I think it's making me understand things a little bit more. You know, also having to deal with myself a lot more. Maybe it's in myself that I have to be doing this. Yeah, I'm starting to do a lot more myself… I mean I was looking at some of my drawings and then looking at the product that I created. My drawings were better than the product and I was like shit, that can't ever happen again. The product has to be better than the drawing because that's the reality, you know.