it's about a furniture workshop
November saw the publication of Star Pieces, The Enduring Beauty of Spectacular Furniture and I’m happy to say that the three-legged hall table was selected for it’s pages. You can read more about the book here on the Thames and Hudson website.
It’s in the literature. 3-Legged Hall Table photographed by Edward Barber.
Taking Time; Craft and the Slow Revolution is now open at it’s first venue, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. A very busy opening night last Friday and plenty of good times had with the other artists and guests. After January the show moves on to Edinburgh. Here are some photos of the final work; a six piece set ‘Anon(.)pts.1-6′ made of wood, metal and thread, and a work ‘Threads’. There are more images posted here
Photo by Richard Battye
the workshop has been full of making over the past weeks getting pieces ready for the first leg of the touring show Taking Time Craft and the Slow Revolution. It opens in Birmingham on the 17th October for a 3 month showing but as usual the last few days of making were anything but slow, late changes, pieces evolving and that feeling wanting to carry things further but needing to draw work to a close for now to meet deadlines and expectations. So some new work is made, time now to let it settle and live a little out there before reflecting and moving along. 
Its funny who comes out of the woodwork sometimes, this little chap turned up the other day while I was making work for the Slow Revolution show
I nearly forgot to put up these images of a piece that I particularly liked. Helen Carnac had asked me to make the supporting work for her work that was to be shown at Collect, a series of vitreous enamel and steel bowls set on a large drawn and printed panel. The brief was “I don’t want a plinth!”, the resulting leg frame of pegged and lapped unfinished oak sections developed, and gained its own quiet autonomy in it’s making leading to something more of a collaboration than either of us had imagined at the start.
The rest of the week should prove interesting, I was invited to show at Art in Action, held in the grounds of Waterperry House in Oxfordshire Art in Action is a public event with artists and makers demonstrating and doing their craft. I’ve never really done this sort of thing before, certainly not for such a period of time and so intensely. I don’t really include it the same experience or activity as teaching, even showing how things are done in workshop class; with that there is a distance, showing a technique or method of how to get something done efficiently and safely making sure all the students understand. The method or technique is commonly held knowledge and usually part of a teaching programme and although any way of doing something will contain or show some of the doer’s foibles teaching is a process of moving and imparting knowledge, there is an objectivity in the intention. So while many of these things may still apply while showing at Art in Action this is the real me performing. I anticipate it will feel more subjective and personal, people seeing me do something the way I do it with more of me invested in it as opposed to demonstrating how something should be done. I think I might stop making sense soon and I think topic needs a thesis not a blog-post!
So what to take and show? Something more tangible that starting with bare boards but not carrying hours of risk in ‘just finishing off’ a job working in a strange environment. Well I thought that I would go for something in between; some pre-made roughed out components for a version of the popular 3-legged hall table and an almost finished new piece that needs drawers and other separate parts making. This piece, a dressing and jewellery cabinet in pearwood, maple, walnut and cedar can be seen in the pictures sitting in the workshop amongst some of the full size models of the piece. I’ll also be making a small seat to go with this piece. It should be fun, plenty of people to see and speak to and we are camping in the field next door.
Come and say hello, I’ll be in the woodwork tent.
An interesting visit last week. With ‘ Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Revolution’ hoving into view in early October I am looking forward to spending time in the workshop over the summer making some new work for the show. As a sort of kick-start a few of the exhibitors met up with Helen to look at the first venue in the tour, Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery. These are a few photos of the space. It was good to meet Shane Waltener and Paul Scott and talk about possible directions for working and to listen to other people’s responses to the space. A beautiful woodblock floor of unusually small elements that has a regularity and complexity of a woven textile, the cast iron columns having a certain visual softness, geometric yet somehow just a little fluid. The high ceiling supported on riveted beams. Its a very large space and a rare opportunity to show work with a lot of air around it and long and varied sightlines, not necessarily how furniture usually lives but a luxury to enjoy. So some talk, a space, I just need to make the work now.
after the non-specificity of pieces like Silo it felt like I should make a cabinet with a very definite role. This is one of them, Volume/Composition holds 320 compact discs. Made out of my usual materials; european oak and black steel with some handles by Helen you can even take the shelves out and use it for something else. This piece can currently be seen at Contemporary Applied Arts in London.
Some commissions that have recently left the workshop: A lounge rocking chair that you might have seen on the main website before but this time upholstered in a textile by Margo Selby. Then two hallway tables both developed with clients after they had seen the Three-Legged Hall Table at exhibition. Again, the original table is on the main website but these two versions were responses to a request for a compact desk space with some storage for a laptop and notebooks that sat well in a domestic hallway and a development with a mirror and stool to use as a dressing table in the hallway of a London flat. Both of these are around 150mm lower in height than the original table.
Shown here without the backrest cushion, this textile and many others can be seen at margoselby.com
In quarter-sawn English oak with an adjustable mirror.
In maple and with four legs.
So a few more images from the foundry project in Munich. And as below a good project to have done, my previous trips to Schmuck have been as a visitor catching up with friends and seeing what is going on but what has struck me this time as a participant taking in some other gallery openings and shows is given Munich’s reputation as one of the European centres of avant-garde studio jewellery how very conservative the whole set-up seemed. A self-referential 3-day community fencing itself in; constructing it’s parameters and discourses very much in it’s own image. The city itself is a conservative place too, very ordered; probably very easy to be seen as stepping out of line even with what struck us as pretty normal clothing. Not many surprises around street corners, less food for the flaneur than most European cities.
playing keepy-upy with a bit of Dave Clarke’s work.
Lots of good stuff to see from the train between London and Munich.
That box and all the bits.
Cotton lines and a Dave Clarke boot.
