2023
Furniture Kitchen
2023
This project is an exploration of the parallels between cooking and making: Asking why it is we are so keen to cook for ourselves, but not so keen to make for ourselves?
Within this project I compare knock-down furniture to ready-meals. Neither of them teach us how their outcomes were made; both are products of convenience and void of learning. Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.
The project culminated in a cookbook for furniture, titled Furniture Kitchen, in which the first half teaches the reader about ingredients (materials), methods, and tools for making furniture. And the second half puts those learnings into practice on basic pine board furniture which begs for a bit of the readers new found knowledge and intuition.
The cookbook discusses ideas on how we ended up learning to cook and how we didn’t end up learning to make.
It covers the less commonly known nature of wood, discussing how it is grown and converted into standardised planks and introducing the idea of grain stability.
The book also proposes a ‘furniture pantry’ for the reader to keep somewhere in their home: a store of tools and parts to keep on hand for the making, repair, and maintenance of their furniture; in the same way that we keep a kitchen in our homes for the preparation of food.
