Market Talent: Mustang Suzy

-- Interior Design, 5/1/2008 12:00:00 AM

She zooms around New York in a 1967 Mustang convertible. And that's just the initial indication that Suzanne Tick is a woman with a past. More to the point, she's looking back on it. "Our work is rooted in the social and design revolutions of the '60's. Those were my informative years," the textile aficionada says. Designing a dozen collections for a quartet of companies, she relied on a single self-invented muse, Revolution Reality, and her diverse attributes. Tick reels them off: "Supergraphics, transparency, the diffusion of light, tectonic structures, modular thinking, contemplative fields, the hand, the machine."

The rebellion begins at Knoll, as KnollTextiles introduces six of her designs in polyester: Louver and Escala drapery fabrics, the latter described as a "nod to handmade Bohemian open-weaves"; Amplify and Bandwidth, complementary panel fabrics in a spider weave; multicolored Mantilla wall coverings, which mimic grass cloth; and Domus, a basic twill-weave wall covering combined with three wefts. Then there's carpet. For the Bloomsburg Carpet Industries brand Tuva Looms, which she founded, she designed Life Line, a cut-loop nylon velvet broadloom meant to resemble zebrawood. And her Manufactured Landscapes collection of modular carpet for Tandus exhibits the influence, she says, of the "unsettling yet beautiful" photography of Edward Burtynsky. But the collaboration that's most unusual for her is the one with Skyline Design. For the company's A Collection in Whites, she translated her signature weaves into 10 patterns of etched glass, including Kinetic Lines.

Knoll, 215-679-7991; knoll.com. circle 417 Bloomsburg Carpet Industries, 212-688-7447; bloomsburgcarpet.com. circle 418 Tandus, 800-248-2878; tandus.com. circle 419 Skyline Design, 888-278-4660; skydesign.com. circle 420