Michele Oka Doner’s ‘Microscopic’ Wallpaper
When Michele Oka Doner was a teenager, her favorite book was “Microbe Hunters” by Paul de Kruif. “I loved the microscope,” said Ms. Doner, a Manhattan artist known for sculpture, furniture and home accessories that celebrate nature. “My heroine was Madame Marie Curie.”
Microscopic, one of the designs in her newest wallpaper collection for Studio Printworks, a manufacturer in Hoboken, N.J., depicts things that float in the sea — “life forms, hidden until the microscope came,” Ms. Doner said. The branchlike pieces (top left) are abstract renderings of kelp, which isn’t hard to see with the naked eye, but the circular forms in the larger design (bottom left) include diatoms (aquatic microfossils with silica shells) and foraminifera (single-celled protists).
The paper, which comes in six background colors, is $450 a roll at Artware Editions, 270 Bowery (Houston Street); (212) 463-7490 or artwareeditions.com.