David Gates's Blog

New piece

davidgates — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 11:27:24 +0000

Just finished in the last few weeks. A sideboard for a private client. The piece is predominantly in European oak, about 2 metres long, with a carcase construction of through dovetails and mortice-and-tenon joints and a panelled solid ash back. With drawer-fronts in brown oak, the drawers are dovetailed front and back in maple with solid ash bottoms in traditional slips. The top drawer also has a removable cutlery tray.

The Tool at Hand, Milwaukee.

davidgates — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:24:24 +0000

It was a privilege and a challenge to accept the invitation from Ethan Lasser of the Chipstone Foundation to make work for this show. The brief was to make a piece of work using just one tool. The show opens this week at Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, USA.

The participating artists were asked to make a short film to reflect upon or discuss how they engaged with the project. The films are shown alongside the works, mine can be seen here:

There was encouragement to make work within the bounds of our usual disciplines. For a studio furniture maker to work with one tool is quite a challenge, it is a field that has developed innumerable specialised tools and devices to control and refine its usual material – wood. The task then was to reverse a couple of hundred years or so of specialisation to redacted generalisation. I adapted a disposable contractor’s saw, a tool often at hand in the basements and sheds of people other than cabinet-makers. This was re-made to split, saw, scrape, shave and shear. The resulting work was as much a result of the tool coming together with the material (a single offcut of oak) than me imparting my will upon either. A discernible shift in the dynamic between tool, material and worker emerged. I chose to work on an extension to my ongoing series, In Our Houses, a project partly born of using a reduced toolkit.

More from the stairs…

davidgates — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 09:05:16 +0000

Intelligent Trouble at King’s College London.

davidgates — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 09:47:35 +0000

All this week, from the 7th-11th November Intelligent Trouble will be making a work at King’s College London as part of the Festival of Making and Materials. Helen Carnac, Katy Hackney, Shane Waltener and David Gates will be working on the impressive main staircase at the river-end of the Strand Campus. The staircase rises through 100 feet and 8 storeys, subtle changes in architectural style, irregular flights, returns and dog-legs all tell something of the way this building was put together over time. We will be weaving, lacing, crossing and dropping jute yarn through the iron, stone and space.

The piece will grow over the week, these images show some initial steps. King’s College is publicly accessible, from the entrance on the Strand walk through the reception and carry on for the whole length of the main corridor, you will find us there between 2.30 and 5.30 each day.

Intelligent Trouble: LOOP. Opening today

davidgates — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 09:07:37 +0000

Intelligent Trouble have been making new work and it is showing from today at Contemporary Applied Arts in London. Katy Hackney, David Littler, Helen Carnac, Robert Ebendorf, David Clarke and David Gates have been working together, moving objects, tools, words and sounds around and between them. The show will change and alter during it’s run as we respond to the setting and as the work settles.

There will be an informal talk at 4.30 on the 4th August just before the private view.

Work in progress…

Wesley-Barrell Craft Award.

davidgates — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 19:06:15 +0000

I am very happy to be able to say that I have won the Wesley-Barrell Craft Award furniture category for my recent dressing-stand. The award is for established professional makers, criteria included ‘the use of traditional craft skills utilised in an innovative and contemporary way to create beautiful and hand-crafted one-off pieces’.

Wesley-Barrell will be publishing information about the awards in a few days time and I will post a link to the press-release here.

The piece is shown here and is intended as contemporary response to a recently neglected type of domestic furniture, the dressing table. Made from pearwood, maple, cedar and walnut, it’s compact size and open-frame base provides a place for jewellery, make-up and accessories.

On the radio

davidgates — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 09:34:21 +0000

During Collect Eleanor Flegg interviewed a small number of artists for RTE radio in Eire, it was broadcast on the 5th July but you can link to a podcast of the piece here.

Eleanor is a writer and academic who is currently researching histories of the crafts council of Ireland.

clarity

davidgates — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 08:12:46 +0000

The work from Host has returned from the USA, only taking two-and-half months to do so. A time to think about the project, perhaps to clarify some comments made at an event yesterday and to think forward to a re-working of the project that will be showing at Contemporary Applied Arts in London during August. I’ll endeavour to have something up here for the end of the weekend.

Look, no picture.

Showing at Collect

davidgates — Tue, 03 May 2011 08:51:56 +0000

I will be showing work with New Brewery Arts at Collect, at the Saatchi Gallery, London. Friday 6th May – Monday 9th May.

Pairings, a conference in Manchester

davidgates — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 11:18:02 +0000

I’ll be presenting papers at the Pairings conference in May at the Manchester School of Art, drawing on my ongoing research and experiences working in collaborative settings such as Intelligent Trouble, Pairings and Host.