Rob Kesseler is a visual artist and Professor of Ceramic Art & Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design. Born in 1951 in Solihull, sandwiched between the industrial heartlands of the midlands and the rural idyll of Shakespeare's Warwickshire, the dual influences of nature and culture, art and industry have had a lasting influence on Kesseler's work.

After initially studying ceramics at the Central School of Art Design in London 1970-73, he has followed a creative path that straddles design, fine art and applied art that overlap and explores the interrelationship between the Arts and Sciences, in particular the natural world.

The botanical world has always occupied a central role, for which he was recognised in 2001 by his appointment as NESTA Fellow at Kew where he has been working with microscopic plant material. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society and in 2009 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Rob is currently working with molecular biologists at the Gulbenkian Science Institute in Portugal. He exhibits internationally and in 2007 his book; Seeds, time capsules of life, with Wolfgang Stuppy, published by Papadakis, was awarded a gold medal at the Independent Publishers Awards in New York. In 2010 Rob Kesseler Up Close, a monograph of the artists work was published by Papadakis.

Inspiration

The design for the Seed Man Chair was inspired by the paintings of the 16th century Italian painter Archimboldo who created portraits of human heads made up of fruits and vegetables. In the spirit of Thomas Heatherwick's Seed Cathedral for the Shanghai Expo, the Seed Man Chair is a hybrid Chinese Warrior made up from magnified images of seeds from continents around the world dancing on a colourful bed of seeds and pollen.

The original seeds were photographed on a scanning electron microscope at Kew by the artist Rob Kesseler. The highly detailed black and white images were painstakingly coloured to reflect the plants from which they were taken.