In Howards End, E.M. Forster wrote, “Only connect,” and this simple phrase well describes the impulse that drives the work I do as a furniture maker. It also helps answer the question, “Why furniture?” “Why not painting or sculpture?”
My goal as an artisan is to work always “in relation” along as many axes of exchange as possible. When I am designing a piece for a client, I constantly imagine the piece along a reciprocal axis of interpretation as I attempt to understand the client’s needs and desires and the life narrative that my piece will attempt to enrich. More than that, my ideas will be fed by the vocabularies of the architecture within which my clients will use and enjoy my piece and of the art and other material objects with which they will surround it. Even when there is no client, I am constantly imagining a human and cultural and architectural context for each creative decision I make. These elements interact as I choose wood or other materials for a project, letting the graphics, the color, the texture, even the aroma of the timber influence the movement of my thoughts within the design process. Even the medium in which I draw makes itself felt. Is it pencils on a pad or drawing board or is it a CAD program in my computer? How many revisions will I do? As each of these intricate influences makes its weight felt, I can sense my individual ego, my self if you will, settling back into a smaller and ever more comfortable and well supported corner of the creative process.
And now out into the workshop, armed with some drawings perhaps and with a warm sense of being nourished by the many “others” who have joined me to confirm a kind of communal value in what I’m about to attempt. I am armed too with a repertoire of skills, skills that quicken my hands and body with energy drawn along another axis of relations, this one reaching deep into the past. There is, after all nothing new in woodworking, nothing much of genius or originality in its techniques. Most of what I will do in my shop was done the same way in the seventeenth century, give or take a little electrical current for efficiency here and there. And some few tricks were carried out back then, by a Tompion or a Stradivari, with greater refinement than we shall ever likely recover for our own practice. And what about my hand tools? Some of them I’ve made myself with those inherited skills but others have been forged by Japanese masters whose fathers and grandfathers and great grandfathers have perhaps made only a single kind of tool. Something of their culture and their traditions will also flow through my hands and into the piece of furniture that I make here, diminishing yet a bit more the subjective singularity of “my” creative process.
What kind of “artist” am I, then? A kind of anti-artist I would say since we tend to think of the artist as a discrete self, possessed of a unique imagination, an extraordinary vision that sees unaided what ordinary folk cannot see. This is the Romantic artist, suitable to painting or sculpture in our time perhaps, but one that I was not cut out to be. Like Forster, I must connect to create. I need a medium, like furniture, with a rich tradition of its own terms and forms. I need a communal and material net within which my work can generate meaning. Even these simple pieces that explore the connection between the earth, the stone, the timber and the artisan’s hand still require for their completion a new owner’s human context, the final extension of their living net.