Inspired by nature…..
June 30, 2010
Here’s the story of another of our former students
After an award-winning BBC career producing and presenting natural history radio, Grant Sonnex gave it all up to join the one year course here. He has now established his own fine furniture workshop on the edge of the Cotswold hills.
Creativity and making were always at the centre of Grant’s life. During his time at the BBC these skills were largely channelled into sound through music and radio. But the visual side of creativity was always lurking and came out through the handmade furniture that he made for his own homes. Landscape painting and photography then began to take a hold and the need developed for a major outlet for his visual creativity. Grant took the plunge, swapped radio craftsmanship for furniture craftsmanship, and he hasn’t looked back.
Grant came here on a one year course back in 2009. He committed himself wholeheartedly to his time here, taking every opportunity to develop his craftsmanship and design skills. As a result he produced some stunning pieces.
Grant has now gone on to set up his own workshop and, often using nature as his inspriation, is producing beautiful contemporary furniture like this cabinet entitled Dartmoor Stream.
On his website Grants says ‘It was with David Savage in Devon that I developed my furniture design, and I learnt my craftsmanship from David’s hugely respected maker, Daren Millman. It was marvellous to have the chance to learn from such an experienced and original furniture designer and from a true master furniture craftsman.’
See more of Grant’s work at his website
Comments (0)Walnut Dining Chairs go to Wales.
June 1, 2010
This bank holiday weekend I am on the road with a car load of chairs. We carefully checked that, with a squeeze, I could carry all ten chairs in my Audi A6 Estate – only just, it means I sit hunched over the wheel, but it’s worth it. At last the chairs are done, Ben and Steve have finished with shaping, sanding and polishing, and so ten lovely chairs go off to their new home
Without a photo we would have no record of the work, so before they left Darren Hull was “shooting them to bits.” Hundreds of exposures produced four good expressive images that tell some of the story for you, and hopefully show you some idea of how beautiful these girls are.
read more about the “The Girls” here
Comments (1)Without the marble….
May 20, 2010
Just recently one of the world’s truly great furniture makers Tom Hucker was able to join us here at Rowden Workshops and spend a short time with our students. He was here on vacation I were lucky that he was able to do this. It was a wonderful experience and I wish I’d had a tape recorder. He talked about is work and how he became a furniture maker. he was going to go one stage to art college but felt particularly uncertain about the world that was so difficult to evaluate. and gave a wonderful example of hearing about a German conceptual artist whose art was to cut pieces off himself in front of the camera. Tom said “I really didnt want to get into that that kind of world”
Tom talked instead about the the inspiration that his grandmother a former concert pianist had given him and the understanding of how to do anything like that one needed to acquire skill. For skill is like the visual vocabulary, just the building blocks of language enabling one to say something in one’s chosen medium. Tom talked about the relationship between skill and one’s knowledge of the material one was working a skill that is never complete but always growing. He talked about the responsive relationship that one has as a furniture maker with timber. How one is constantly seeking to be on the balancing point between extending the potential of the material pushing it to its limits of structure and expression and doing nothing. Nothing that is except stepping aside and allowing, enabling, the material to just shine.
The dichotomy is one of control, or release of control. The dominating, manipulative nature of skill, how we can impose our egos upon a piece of wood. Or, we can simply free the image that is within the material. Like a sculptor seeing the object inside the stone her job quite literally is to remove the waste material, allowing the David who was there all the time to be seen. Without the block of marble there would be no David.
Thanks Tom.
World famous furniture maker to visit Rowden
May 11, 2010
Thomas Hucker, world famous award winning furniture maker, is due to visit Rowden Workshops next Monday to give a presentation and to speak with our students. He is one of only a handful of designer makers to be included in “Furniture with Soul,” a book to be published early 2011 by leading Japanese publishers Kodansha International. Tom produces elegant and detailed pieces in his studio in Hoboken, New Jersey. When speaking of Tom’s work the noted English furniture designer John Makepeace said “Tom’s work is poetry, sheer poetry”.
I am delighted that such a distinguished furniture maker is taking the time to come and speak with our students, and I’m sure they’ll benefit hugely from the experience.
Inspired by nature….
May 4, 2010
After an award-winning BBC career producing and presenting natural history radio, Grant Sonnex gave it all up to join the one year course here back in 2009. He’s now established his own fine furniture workshop on the edge of the Cotswold hills.
Grant committed himself wholeheartedly to his time here, taking every opportunity to develop his craftsmanship and design skills. As a result he produced some stunning pieces. Grant has now gone on to embark on the next stage of his life changing adventure. He has set up his own workshop and, often using nature as his inspiration, is producing beautiful contemporary furniture like this cabinet entitled Dartmoor Stream.
Dartmoor Stream
Good luck to you Grant!
To see more of Grant’s work visit his website at Contemporary Fine Furniture
Comments (0)Class War and Furniture Making.
March 25, 2010
Class War and Furniture Making.
Recently I got a rather pompous e-mail from a fellow furniture maker. He was complaining about my use of the name Woody Nooz, saying that “it made him cringe”.
The choice of the name is very deliberate on my part it is a political choice. Americans and Canadians amongst you will be surprised at my use of language, but Britain I will remind you even in the 21st century is a class ridden culture.
Before I started on this path the term Designer didn’t mean very much. One of the new professions along with Sociologist and Psychologist. When I was training, artist craftsmen like Bernard Leach and Michael Cardew and Edward Barnsley were employed to leave their well established workshops, come into colleges and bring their real-world experience with them. That all changed about the time I was wandering aimlessly though Art School.
In house lecturers found the presence of these “pros” just too challenging. In the 1970s we saw at the Royal College of Arts a new emerging breed of white collar design tutors. Students were no longer required to make their major projects themselves technicians did that instead. Chaps in brown overalls with half moon glasses and a lifetime in the industry were employed to make the students designs.
In the 1980s when I was struggling to get going being a Woody was a term of abuse, Real furniture designers didn’t require too much contact with material, certainly not enough to work up a sweat, all that was for the technicians. I happily proclaim myself to be a Woody in the same lineage is Bernard Leach or Michael Cardew and the wonderful Edward Barnsley.
This is the tradition of the artist craftsmen. I don’t call myself a designer any more. I am not involved with industry, I dont want to fill restaurants with my chairs. I’m interested in expression and making is important to me as a means of realising that expression. It is important to me that I know how to make, that I have a profound understanding of my material. Wood, in particular, has the extraordinary capacity to stun and startle even after prolonged acquaintance. It is important to me that the making goes on around me, that ideas I may have, images I want to bring to life, are tested against a skilled maker’s profound knowledge of the task in front of her. That dialogue is profoundly important. “I want it this way.” “Well I need fixing….” “How big a fixing….” “Well I could make it…..”
Comments (0)London Contemporary Furniture Exhibition
March 9, 2010
Opening Wednesday 31st March at the Millinery Gallery in Islington is the second exhibition of British Contemporary Furniture. More details to follow. See exhibited there “Andromeda” by David Savage. This piece is featured on the front of exhibition catalogue.
The following is the unedited frontispiece to this exhibition
The Millinery Works is closely associated with the Arts and Crafts movement and in this exhibition, many of the makers have a similar association, often in fact a direct inspiration. The Arts and Crafts movement was a movement of political and aesthetic revolt. Its supporters and exponents were against a Victorian urban industrialism led by inspirational socialist thinkers of the calibre of William Morris and artists like Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rosetti.
The makers in this show can certainly be regarded as a movement, though perhaps some would not share my direct assertion. However, what they are revolting against may be less clear. The web forum that has enabled this exhibition to be staged contains a loose association of rugged individuals. Each maker supporting a myriad of different causes, ideals and creative directions. Most are deliberately working far from the centres of cultural power and influence. They inhabit small isolated workshops, some in urban but many in rural settings often creating work inspired by land, wind and weather. All the makers will have had to become expert at providing an exceptional customer service – they listen carefully to their clients and respond with a sensitive and creative interpretation. Time and again these artisans have exceeded their customer’s expectation and made something that is truly extraordinary. The best will have the support of genuinely creative patronage.
If the makers are a movement, like those of the Arts and Crafts period, one has to ask what are they demonstrating against? Today’s fine furniture makers, through their remarkable work, reveal the lack of quality elsewhere in our culture. Such work is a counterpoint to poor standards, sound bite journalism, the cheapness of our thinking, and the sheer lack of genuine quality in our lives. This body of work underlines and highlights the joy of excellence and true craftsmanship.
The exhibition here last year was an unqualified success; the exhibitors then as now showed work that stunned with the quality of design, concept and execution. Workmanship, a key tenet of Arts and Crafts ideology was seen almost as “a given”, an unquestionable, integral aspect of the work displayed. It proves, if there was any doubt, that today’s British Art and Craft exponents carry on a remarkable tradition and express the philosophy in a manner that it relevant and contemporary. Design and Expression are becoming two parts of the same occupation as makers use their considerable technical vocabulary to begin to speak clearly and meaningfully about our age and our culture.We see here and now a period of furniture making being referred to as a “Golden Period” and once again British Furniture Makers, as a movement, are leading the world.
David Binnington Savage Feb 2010.
Comments (5)Floating Furniture: Short Movie
Have a quick look at this lovely piece of workmanship by one of our current students Ed Wild. The last time I saw this it was on a piece reputed to have been made in the workshops of one Thomas Chippendale. Have a look here
Comments (1)Davids On Line Design Seminars
Why not join Davids Free On Line Design Seminars. This is a series of short, often illustrated e-mails arriving every seven days. He will be covering topics from drawing to structure from style to surface. Stimulating, challenging and hopefully informative. Join here
Comments (0)Alumni Class of 2009
January 29, 2010
A posh, no, pretentious, word for the student body. Why dont we take photos of each year suggested Tim Lovett. Well here you all are Class of 2009.
Fine Furniture Maker Students of 2009