Icing on the cake

On Friday evening we went to the opening at the Carnegie Gallery.
Mark a fellow woodworker hung the show .I must say it looked really good
I knew that I was going to win something because. I was called to make sure that I would attend the opening. I would have attended any ways it was the first time I had work in a gallery in eight years.
Allison Rose the person who organized the show was presenting the awards and when she took her turn at the front of the room I became quite nervous..I knew that would not win an award for best wood work because this piece is more mixed media.
Well there was no mixed media award for me so I began to wonder, best new artist to the Gallery something like that, Then Allison said and now for the last award Best of Show. I just stood there for a while when she called my name. I was a little taken a back but at the same time very excited.
The rest of the evening was spent talking with friends and making new friends, it was a wonderful way to end the process of making this piece.
This award has given me the boost that I needed to get going again; it’s nice to know that after a few years off I can still produce work that others enjoy.

Its done and with time to spare

Bow Tie Bumper Daniel Durocher

With this piece I was interested in the process of making.
I was not interested in preliminary drawings or in controlled outcomes.
I did not exactly know where I was going and chose instead to let the material speak for its self.
In the process I let the unexpected things come from inside the material.
What became apparent in this piece of discarded bumper was a new use.
Maybe on some level it was because the truck that I was a passenger in hit so many birds on our trip from Edmonton to Yellowknife this fall.
Maybe it was the round hole on the section of the bumper that reminded me of a home for a bird.
Once I cut the section of bumper in two, it became apparent what it would be.

It's really a Chevy BowTie

Ok ...I have been a little busy, trying to get a job.... these days that is job one, this piece that I am working on for the juried show has taken up allot of time as well.
I am in the process of painting it and writing an artist statement. I hope to have it assembled tomorrow and will work on a system for hanging it on the wall. I will post new images soon.

Dodge Bumper

Ok.. I spent the better part of the morning, Fitting the top of the Bumper Bird House to the main section...lots of time spent with my pattern makers file, sometime later and I am ready to glue up the center leg section..I used Oak, Birch and Walnut paperback veneer to make up this section...it is good now, and fits the cross section nicely. Here are some pix’s of the glue up for the center section...It took some time to get here but I think that it is worth it...

Dodge Bumper

Arts Hamilton along with the Carnegie Gallery has put a call of submissions. It is a juried show called "Designer Craft" The show will open November the 7th 2008. If I want to make the cut my work has to be in by the 3rd of November.

I started out thinking, that I would make a piece that would be made of recycled material, Mainly some lath that I pulled out of our 100 year old home the last time I did a small reno.

So I started with the premise, that I would make small bed side tables.

I glued up the lath to form the sides of the carcass but after assembling the last side, I realised that the piece would not look like I had envisioned it in my mind’s eye.

Back to the drawing board. Bed side tables would have to wait

I was looking at my material stash which has dwindled quite a bit and thought to myself that I was going about this the wrong way. I was trying to make something out of the material I had on hand,

This is not usually how I work. I usually draw and then decide what material will work best for my idea.

Then all of sudden I remembered a Bird House idea they would utilize a front bumper from a Dodge truck.

I was back in the game. Recycled material use and a more solid idea,

Here is what I have to date.

Studio Furniture is a subfield of studio craft centered around one-of-a-kind or limited production furniture objects designed and built by craftspeople. The work is made in a craftsperson'studio setting as opposed to being made in a high volume factory. This conception of the site of production as being a studio links studio furniture to studio art and reflects its status as an individual creative process. Studio furniture objects often embody creative and/or communicative intent, a unique design, elements of functionality (either implicit or explicit), craftsmanship, and an intimate understanding of material in their creation. Studio furniture objects, perhaps because of their close association with sculpture and other fine art, are shown as often in art galleries as they are in furniture showrooms. As is the case in the Studio Crafts at large, this contested identity is the impetus for frequent intra-field dialogue and differing intellectual positions on the matter.

Elements of Studio Furniture

Studio Furniture incorporates the design process differently than IndustrialDesign or Product Design, but the designing of the object is an integral and important part of its creation none-the-less. Because of the requisite functionality (or implied functionality) of Studio Furniture, makers must design objects so that they fulfill their intended physical purpose. For example, a functional chair must be able to support the weight of the human body in a sitting position. After this requirement is met, other purposes may also be supported; the chair might also be designed with certain ergonomics considerations for user comfort or it might additionally be able to support the body while standing or reclining. While the meeting of physical requirements links Studio Furniture to other design fields, the expression of personal creative intent links the practice to theFine Arts. Design comes in to play in the realization of this intent as well; successful Studio Furniture must be designed to simultaneously meet conceptual needs without compromising its functional goals.
The practice of design within the field of Studio Furniture, as with other Studio Crafts, follows a trajectory that that is unique in terms of the process of making. The design process begins with preliminary sketches or models, but this is not a “preconceptualization of the finished work in all its elements and details” which would then be executed by a maker (separate from the designer), as it might be in a Product Design setting. According to Howard Risatti in “A Theory of Craft,” “instead of being separated into stages, conception and execution are integrated so that a subtle feedback system occurs when physical properties of materials encounter conceptual form and conceptual form encounters physical material" The design of the object, to a great degree, happens concurrently with its creation. The skill of the maker and his or her ability to work with the subtleties and variations of the material, allowing those variations to inform and exalt the conceptual and functional goals of the piece, is intrinsically tied in to the object’s design.

This defenation is from a Wikipedia article, which I feel sums up what is to be a Studio Furniture Maker.

As I become more versed in this medium of blogging, I know that I will need to be less reliant on others definitions.
Hopefully my work and the process will lead you through how I look at what I really enjoy doing.
This is the beginning of a new journey for me. I hope that we can share some discussions about what it is to be a Studio Maker