Split Stool
Year : 2024
Capable of being put together without glue or hardware, the Split Stool is an attempt to explore and emphasize the joy of “making” through mechanical structures: mortises, tenons, & wedges.
Working with wood
always makes me think about how much human intervention I put into the material. Cutting a tree down is already an intervention, but from an art and design perspective, I feel there’s an interesting balance between the raw and the artificial (if there is any). For this project, I set a rule not to glue boards together to make a wider panel and to work within the parameters of the roughly milled lumber.
Thus were born the structurally unnecessary sliding dovetails on the legs and the butt crack on the seat. The no-glue rule gradually expanded to no hardware, which became 90% true (there are 2 screws on the grape-dyed version ;P).
For finishing the wood,
I referenced natural dyeing techniques for fabric. As a maker, I enjoy the process of trial and discovery and the excitement of unpredictable outcomes. Natural dyeing from plants and insects falls into this territory where you can predict but can’t expect the same outcome each time (similar to glazing in ceramics?). The possible results can exponentially grow when you consider the type of wood, the type of mordant, the type of top coat, and so on.
My boss and I had what I call the “orange break,” where we talked about the day while munching on an orange or tangerine. The natural dye experiment started with the orange peels that accumulated over the months, then expanded to testing other ingredients like onion skin, grape skin, cochineal, logwood, indigo powder, eggplant skin, avocado skin, and more.
