According to his student Sergio Los, the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa “emphasized that one reaches truth through manual constructional work…” Engaging in manual labor, when it is sufficiently free and the laborer is committed to the quality of its product reveals truths about tangible materials, methods of work, and the faculties and fortitude of the worker. While our contemporary culture and economy are no less dependent on manual labor than in pre-industrial times, the value of materially productive labor has been obscured as physical work has become separated from creative and expressive modes of activity. In order to arouse the latent carpenter in a time of impersonal social networks and books with no pages I am compelled to make objects and to create spaces where people can work with their hands to discover simple truths about wood, splinters, and ink on paper.
The creation of a joint or connection between two materials represents a distillation of the process of craft, as it has existed since stone axes were affixed to handles and lintels were first put atop posts. The emphasis on joints evident in Scarpa’s architecture, which resonates with Gottfried Semper’s notion of tectonics and his assessment of the joint as “the primordial tectonic element”, shapes his approach to building as a collaborative process that draws upon the skills and insights of individual craftspeople. As Scarpa’s work and architectural practice demonstrate, when the joint becomes the central aesthetic focus of design the maker is necessarily an active and acknowledged part of the creative process. The truth that Scarpa sought through labor was to be found, as an architect, in the act of drawing. But likewise, and I would argue to a greater extent, the practice of joinery provides a pure experience of the truths that can be apprehended through labor. It requires the joiner to consider the current state of the materials in hand, their origins and future behavior, and it demands that the joiner envision a future state that is more complex and interconnected than that of the pre-existing components in their independence.
The danger inherent in this simple and contemplative practice is that the worker, and society as a whole, becomes more concerned with the complex future state of the materials being joined than with the nature of the materials themselves and with their adherence—as a newly formed amalgam—to other natural processes. When the material products of labor and the comforts that they afford are venerated to the extent that the insightful art of the joiner is dispensed with in favor of a more efficient labor of repetition and drudgery then the worker will find not find any truth of self through his work but rather the truths of a competitive labor market. As a carpenter the joy and challenge in cutting, shaping, and fixing a joint is largely to be found in the cognitive task of imagining your goal of parts joined, and seeing it realized, but, perhaps because of the pride imbued in these joints and the desire to see them eternal, many of the materials that compose our built environment today are joined in ways that do not take into account their own demise or future reuse.
The goal of permanence is pervasive. I make objects that offer alternatives to the persistent, inflexible fixtures of our built environment, objects that are adaptable and open to change. I promote an aesthetic of recombination, using flexible configurations of distinct parts, and playing with juxtapositions of materials from different sources to make functional and exploratory work that exhibits a temporal quality. When a viewer or user can see where the parts of an object came from they might also imagine where they are going.
I make furniture and cabinets, and I make sculpture and works-on-paper that flow from those practices. I am interested in a potentially insidious correlation, or perhaps even confusion, that exists between the concepts of permanence and strength. Contemporary Western culture advocates for long-lasting solutions to problems and enduring products of industry. Materially productive practices in this context (from architecture to furniture production, to electronics manufacturing) generally have a final product with a static end-state, and this tendency to make things that do not change has detrimental social and environmental consequences. The economic incentive to produce more goods converges with an aspiration to make products that never wilt and gives us things that are cheap and resistant to change, adaptation and repair. Stubbornness is confused with durability. Objects with temporary uses are given permanent forms and we are left with the dangerous concepts of disposability and planned obsolescence.
I seek to provide models of adaptability and change that have implications beyond their simple manifestations. There are certain basic elements of our built environment—furniture, cabinets, windows, doors—that offer an ideal medium to communicate these ideas. My work revolves around these fixtures because they are both familiar and intelligible in their composition, making them a potential conduit for organizational concepts of broader scope. I am compelled to make these objects as a way to express a larger vision and because they have the potential to engage users through their material qualities and through the roles they play in our lives and in our economy.
I value the intermediate states of fabrication, the progressive phases of making an object. To celebrate the beauty of these moments I am compelled to let parts remain independent, to resist the “finished” stage and allow the process to go on. Joining simple parts is essential to all building processes but the products of many different approaches—from traditional craft-based techniques to contemporary mechanized methods—often disguise individual parts in the form of a singular whole. This tendency conceals the underlying composition of buildings, furniture, and products, making them less intelligible, more mysterious, and easier to take for granted. It also obscures the labor that goes into making many basic things that we rely upon.
In order to elucidate the processes underlying the creation of our built environment and to engage the public in discourses about the social, environmental and economic significance of productive labor I create work made of simple, distinct and interesting parts.
