ARTIQUE's founder Alice Koerner was raised in suburban Georgia where she learned to be an outdoor enthusiast and a Girl Scout. After surviving several years in the wilderness while mapping the rugged peaks of the Sierra Nevada in California, she came to appreciate a more rural life. She lived up and down the East Coast for half a decade, searching to evolve beyond a corporate gig. Simplifying, she moved to the Lititz/Lancaster area of Pennsylvania were she learned horticulture. Alice handcrafts most of the functional items in her home and curates nature's creations in her garden. Recently relocated to south of the Grand River in the capital of Michigan, Alice works tirelessly to propagate succulents for your natural enjoyment and improved quality of life (and air).

Farming and agriculture are in Alice's DNA and ancestry. The organic De Meyer and Koerner farms of Upstate New York have thrived for generations, and Alice has taken the reigns of the family business, proudly continuing that legacy and planting her proverbial stake in Ingham County, MI, USA. 

Creating and repurposing goods is a personal process for Alice. As a child of the Great Depression, her grandmother Rita taught her to reduce and reuse after carefully cleaning items. In the early eighties, her mother insisted she learn independence and responsibility through sewing, crafting, athleticism, & camping. Her mother Mary took over and operated an antique store in Lilburn, GA, circa 1999, where she trained Alice to identify quality in craftsmanship. Before deciding on a medium or antique, Alice assesses and contemplates how her design will be used and where it will be displayed. Once she’s ready to play, she excitedly works on each piece intimately. Her art feels like second nature, because it is a pure representation of where she's been and how she wants to move forward. Completely opposed to an industrial approach, she guides her products with personification as they are aging items. Her crafts are handled respectfully because they each carry a unique story, which will eventually be embedded in microchips with IoT functionality, i.e. pieces that can Connect, Compute, and Communicate with the evolving world around them. Materials used in her craftsmanship are mostly natural, like wood and glass. Her stickers and canvases are printed and designed with polymers. The natural products, like wood, have a porosity, which allow the artwork to breathe the same atmosphere we do. The antique pieces she reuses already had interesting purposes changing hands, ownership, and locations, as they aged. The material Alice uses to craft her designs has a permeability, allowing air and water particles to interact and change the piece as time, use, and most importantly love, show wear on the goods.

Penetrating Beauty

After years of practice, Alice has found that gently taming and suggesting shape yields the most elegant results. Even when she started small back in 1990, she always matched her meticulousness with curiosity. As a geologist traveling around the globe, she has studied various techniques and designs that have helped her cultivate a singular yet international style. Today, she crafts mostly on her own; spending time in the field and crafting pieces in her home studio. She still makes time to learn new techniques and exhibits at tradeshows all around the nation.

She left the corporate world after injuries and illnesses prevented her from safely working on an onshore oil drilling rig or in front of a computer.  Now, she can use the world as her canvas in her art while she peruses antique markets around Michigan. After penetrating the earth for years, she searches to live harmoniously amongst her environment. She aims to support other artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, and businessmen/women in her community as they work to empower each other and lift up the world around them. 

In Harmony

Our plan is to be a certified B Corporation

i.e.  https://www.bcorporation.net/what-are-b-corps

SOME of our Contributors