chairs

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Art

Masses of Wooden Chairs Pour From Old Villas by Karin van der Molen

Site-specific installation artist Karin van der Molen creates connections between the natural and man-made through chair-based works that flow from the windows of aging villas. In her 2015 piece Flux the Dutch artist created one of her installations at the Le Rayolet in the botanical garden Domaine du Rayol. The wooden chairs meld into a stream of organized logs that connect the work to the surrounding gardens. The piece seems to go from solid to fluid, forming a bridge that she explains “makes us aware of the cross-over between culture and nature.” Molen produces a similar effect in A Wave of Nostalgia which she installed at the Museum Lolland-Falster in Pederstrup, Denmark in 2014. You can view a wider range of her installations on her website. (via WOMENSART)

 

Art

Impractical Wooden Furniture Created to Blend Into its Natural Environment

Hugh Hayden builds furniture not intended for human use, crafting benches and chairs from pieces of wood without removing the original branches or twigs. In these sculptural works the stray forms make it nearly impossible to use the object as a piece of furniture. The shape an Adirondack chair is present, like in his piece The Jones and Other Borrowed Ideas, yet its impediments make sitting an uncomfortable challenge.

Hayden’s imbedded branches serve as a camouflage system that explores how his designed objects might blend into a natural landscape. His piece “Brier Patch,” which features six carved school desks, “juxtaposes the organic, unpredictability of the natural world (e.g. undergrowth,
a thicket etc.) with the ordered and disciplined pursuit of education and greater civilization,” he explains. “The branches extending from the desks are entangled and materialize this integration into the landscape or environment, creating a visible, unifying space, that is at once protective and impenetrable.”

His solo exhibition at White Columns runs through June 2, 2018, and is his first in New York City. Hayden recently received is MFA in Sculpture from Columbia University, and his Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University in 2007. You can see more of his sculptures on his website and Instagram.

Art Design

Full Grown: Trees Grown into Furniture and Art Objects

The most common way of producing wooden furniture is fairly straightforward: grow the proper trees for a few decades, chop ’em down, cut them into smaller pieces and assemble the pieces into a chair. Derbyshire-based furniture designer Gavin Munro wondered if he could try a wholly different approach: what if he could just grow chairs? What if trees could be forced to grow in chair-like shapes and through strategic sculpting and grafting result in an annual “chair harvest.” After a lengthy years-long trial in his mother’s garden and a sturdy proof-of-concept, Full Grown was born.

Munro points out that the idea of growing furniture actually dates back millennia. The Chinese were known to dig holes to fill with chair-shaped rocks and had tree roots grow through the gaps, while the Egyptians and Greeks had a method for growing small stools. But Full Grown appears to be on a scale entirely of its own, with an entire farm destined to be harvested into chairs, assorted light fixtures, and other unusual objects. He shares a bit about the process which can take between 4 to 8 years:

In essence it’s an incredibly simple art. You start by training and pruning young tree branches as they grow over specially made formers. At certain points we then graft them together so that the object grows into one solid piece – I’m interested in the way that this is like an organic 3D printing that uses air, soil and sunshine as its source materials. After it’s grown into the shape we want, we continue to care for and nurture the tree, while it thickens and matures, before harvesting it in the winter and then letting it season and dry. It’s then a matter of planing and finishing to show off the wood and grain inside.

Full Grown’s first prototype willow chair has already found its way into the permanent collection at the National Museum of Scotland, and Munro and his team just launched a Kickstarter to help them bridge the gap in the final year before their first harvest, nearly 11 years in the making. You can learn more on their website.

Craft Design

An Oversized Woven Chair by Veega Tankun

Although London-based designer Veega Tankun has only just graduated from the University of Brighton, she clearly possesses a strong sense of aesthetic and understanding of materials as evidenced in these comfy looking chairs woven from overstuffed knit tubes. Tankun says that she’s fascinated with rejuvenating old techniques in her design practice, bringing modern materials and color palettes to traditional production methods. “Traditional doesn’t always have to mean old and outdated, the trick is to make something that we know new and exciting again,” she shares.

This chunky chair is just one Tankun’s latest creations, you can explore more of her work on Design Milk and Instagram. Some of her pieces will also be on view at London’s Top Drawer starting next month.

Art Design

Chairs and Other Sculptural Objects That Melt Into the Floor by Tatiana Blass

In an installation titled Tails from 2006, Tatiana Blass (previously), presented several wooden chairs and other sculptural objects that seem to melt into the ground. The works merge with the floor through additions of specifically cut lacquered wood or fiber glass, solid forms that give the illusion of both brightly colored and woodgrain patterned liquid. The Brazilian artist is represented by Galeria Millan in Sao Paulo. You can see more of her past and present works on her website.

Art Design

Reinvigorating Wroclaw’s Riverside With Site-Specific Chair Installations

Collaborative duo No Studio, comprised of Polish artists Magda Szwajcowska and Michal Majewski, have placed several architectural interventions in their native city of Wrocław in an attempt to repopulate an area that has become forgotten about and neglected. The project fits site-specific chairs onto concrete stairs that lead to the city’s river, bright blue furniture that also acts as loveseat sunbeds for passersby. The pieces are installed as a part of the DOFA 2016 Lowersilesian Festival of Architecture, which is comprised of works around this year’s slogan of “Spaces for Beauty.”

You can view more of No Studio’s miniature architectural works on their website. (via Designboom)