Exhibition of my furniture in Lyme Regis

I am holding an exhibition of my furniture in the Town Mill Gallery in Lyme Regis, here in west Dorset. It opens this coming Saturday and runs until Wednesday 15 June.

The furniture exhibited will be drawn from thirty years of my work designing and making furniture to individual commission.

(For those who might want to know what I was doing before then, the answer is that I was working in academic publishing – and the really curious will be able to find a few fruits of my erstwhile labours on the shelves of one of the exhibits.)

Although some of the furniture in the exhibition will be for sale, and other items can be repeated (or modified) to order, virtually all of them were designed (or their originals were) for particular individuals – even if that individual was very occasionally myself – and for individual locations. They are therefore very varied in character and type, but they are not confined to their original application. Some of the designs have found more than one home already, although most do remain unique.

Some of the exhibits have been borrowed back for this event and visitors may observe a few marks of their history of use. My furniture is for use, though it also seeks to embody something that may be unexpected, yet right seeming.

Designing and making furniture to commission is a fusion of the intentions and creative impulses of several people. For the commissioner the experience should not be daunting, it should be pleasurable – but it cannot be predictable. You don’t have to know what you want. You do need to know what you want the thing to do for you, and where you might put it: function is important, even if, sometimes, the main function is just to look attractive. Furniture does, after all, furnish a room. But you don’t have to be able to visualise it as a piece of furniture, know what shape it should be, what wood it should be made of, although there is no reason why you should not discuss all that if you do have ideas, positive or negative.

I hope visitors will feel free to talk to me about the process and possibilities, even if they do not think they want to embark on it themselves.

For full details of opening times and of the location please go to the News and exhibitions page on this blog.

Pivot point

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axel-tree.

Recently a fellow furniture designer-maker commended another’s account of the development of our work for knowing ‘which pieces were pivotal’. Whilst I don’t want to dispute the ability of either of them to know what work is genuinely remarkable, I do query whether there is anything so specific, in the collective body of the current work of small furniture designer-makers, as a pivot, or whether we are actually aware of our work turning on (or ignoring) any key development.

We are in fact remarkably ill informed of what the rest of us are currently up to. Our work lacks a mode of publication and a nexus of sociability. We have the misfortune that our product is of sufficient substance to make it difficult for us to move around (we are unlikely to up sticks on a whim and go off to make furniture with our fellows in the south of France), but not of enough substance to make it impossible to ignore as hundreds troop by it on their way to work. It is insufficiently artistic, insufficiently valuable, insufficiently new to be much remarked by critics and commentators. It is too expensive to matter much to the masses. The old network of patronage that used to advance fashions in interior taste has passed away, and those who come closest nowadays to setting public taste or fashion often do so without much commissioning or patronising the work themselves.

So how is new work communicated, even amongst ourselves? We might expect to see our fellows’ work at exhibitions, but furniture exhibitions are in notoriously short supply, unprofitable for their organisers and not always well supported by exhibitors with their best and newest work. Nearly all of us have websites, but few are good at updating them with their latest work. We could in fact quite easily do more than we do to communicate our newest ideas and designs: our association could easily – but does not – have a place in the members’ section of its website specifically for such communication.

I believe we don’t do more to communicate our latest work because we do not want to. We do not want to partly for our own reasons of ‘commercial confidentiality’ (I have more often seen members fret about plagiarism than enthuse that others are developing similar ideas to their own), and partly because we simply do not have much in the way of ideas to communicate.

Having claimed that our work collectively lacks particular direction or sense of purpose, I will now contradict myself (up to a point) by trying to identify some common elements in the most noticed furniture.

One recently discernible is the creation, almost the imposition of textured effects on timber surfaces. Pieces of furniture with this characteristic have been the leading items in several recent group exhibitions in London associated with DMOU. Sometimes, not always, rather than exploiting texture inherent in the material, the surface effects are created with techniques similar to those needed to produce the dead-smooth, high-finish surfaces of the ‘I can’t believe it’s not plastic’ type that many have come inescapably to associate with expensive ‘bespoke’ furniture. Sometimes in these pieces, also, the surface texture is the focus to the noticeable neglect of interest in underlying form.

In that respect it may possibly be a parallel to Martin Grierson’s belief that ‘the success and beauty of a design lie as much in the quality of detail and choice of materials as in the overall concept’. I don’t entirely disagree with that, but I do think it may beg the question whether there is a stable and mature vocabulary of form on which the designer-maker draws. Yet perhaps that is what Martin encompasses in his reference to ‘proper pieces of furniture that exploit traditional forms’.

So, if that is the garlic, where are the sapphires? Elsewhere in these London exhibitions an interest in differentiation by conspicuous form still thrives, with, sometimes, a virtuoso predilection for forms that dramatically challenge methods of timber construction and making ability. A delight in pushing things to extremes – in construction, detailing, refinement, and, in consequence, probably cost – has something to be said for it, and something against. It could be seen as part of the overloading of our culture with a multitude of signs. It can hardly form the basis for a movement – flux perhaps but not a movement in any direction. It cannot be that ‘pivot point’ we seek.

It is, however, what frequently receives the prizes and guildmarks for ‘bespoke’ furniture, although, ironically, the particular pieces that receive these accolades are sometimes not bespoken at all but are instead deliberate speculative punts at awards by designer-makers, and, even so decorated, they may struggle to find purchasers thereafter.

Whether any of this can amount to a continuation of the Arts and Crafts ‘legacy’ (the theme of these exhibitions), beyond a degree of self-regard in our work as furniture designer-makers, I personally doubt. It certainly does not constitute ‘wonderful furniture of a commonplace kind’, to use Ernest Gimson’s description of WR Lethaby’s furniture in the 1890 Arts and Crafts exhibition.

What exactly is meant by that phrase is a little problematic. It perhaps applies more to Gimson’s work than Lethaby’s. Lethaby did not actually design much furniture (or architecture come to that) and some of it might not universally be regarded as commonplace. Nor is it without decoration. But perhaps this is a subject to which I might return.

Current Exhibition: 21st Century Furniture III

The Arts & Crafts Legacy
A Selling Exhibition of Today's Designer Makers

I am currently participating in this exhibition, which has now become an annual event.

What is it that we do when, as ‘designer-makers’ we make a table? What, through the table, do we seek to exhibit? Why do we define our exhibition by reference to furniture-makers in small workshops, in the southern English countryside a century ago, producing ‘wonderful furniture of a commonplace kind’? ‘Art’ and ‘Craft’ are labels that now we are comfortable neither to abandon nor wholeheartedly adopt. ‘Designer’, though now fading from its recent almost universally positive currency, was an offspring of Arts and Crafts through a Balhausian intermediary, where it acquired its renunciation of ornament. Ornament, not universally eschewed by the Arts and Crafts makers, troubles us still. Now that we can make in so many ways (the kind of technical virtuosity that got the Victorians into trouble) we are tempted (as always following the architects) to differentiate our work through form, which can sometimes be as much ‘applied’ as the decoration of the Victorians. Such thoughts are pursued elsewhere on this blog.

The Millinery Works

85/87 Southgate Road

Islington

London N1 3JS

020 7359 2019

20 March to 1 May 2011

closed Mondays and Easter

further details at http://www.millineryworks.co.uk/

Thoughts from an exhibition

21st CENTURY FURNITURE
THE ARTS & CRAFTS LEGACY

This exhibition, of the work of about forty designer-makers, is now closed, but it prompted these thoughts about our relationship to the work of the Arts and Crafts furniture makers.

Wood is a humanly comfortable material in the ways in which it looks, feels and smells. We shape and work it with tools that were, essentially, developed generations ago. We celebrate its sometimes fickle and inconvenient properties and like to think our wooden furniture links us to a natural and living material, placing us a little more securely in the biosphere. Yet woodworking is an artifice and, perhaps, a deception. Almost everything required in seasoned wood furniture construction is at odds with the mechanics of the living tree and its properties as a harvested material. The Arts and Crafts movement strove to accept and demonstrate the material’s nature and limitations, expressing them in its constructional methods – partly in reaction to the virtuoso achievements of eighteenth and nineteenth century cabinet-making. It is an open question in some respects which approach is the more ‘honest’ or fruitful for us today, though we cleave to the Arts and Crafts’ reassertion of the autonomy of craft. In my design and making I, like others, continue that debate between nature and artifice.