When people ask me how I categorize my work or better yet what I call my style of work,I tell them I make functional sculpture. I always avoid the other standard catch phrases like art furniture,contemporary furniture or artiture because functional sculpture best sums up what my work is about. I take a very personal fine art aesthetic to building functional objects for the everyday. I could probably leave it at that enough said, but as I think about it in more depth there is a history of functional sculpture going back to the earliest objects created by humans.
In museums and academia it is categorized as the decorative arts but essentially as humans built the tools and objects necessary for living they did more than just make a nondescript items. They imbued their objects with meaning along with making a tool whose handle was comfortable to grip or chair comfortable to sit by embellishing them with symbols and shapes of meaning to them and their culture. So I can draw a direct line from my work to that of cave man woodworker, now that is enough said!
I am not a woodworker whose work is all about wood though wood is the primary medium in which I work. I would like to think that my designs can stand apart from the materials they are built from and it is seldom that I use flashy figured or exotic woods as the focal point of a piece. I much prefer to use more common woods and color and texture to make my statements and the wood I prefer the most for that task is ash.
Why ash, well for one ash is cheap. Furniture woods go in and out of fashion much like everything else in the world of popular consumption, and as they become popular prices rise. Ash however has never ridden a wave of popularity like oak, walnut, cherry or maple and though it has stayed in common usage mainly as tool handles and baseball bats it’s price has remained stable and relatively inexpensive. This could however change in the near future as an invasive Asian beetle known as the Emerald ash borer has begun destroying many northern states ash forests and may ultimately rival Dutch Elm Disease and Chestnut Blight for it’s path of destruction. So beyond being cheap what makes Ash so attractive, let me count the ways. Ash has a wonderful color ,a little whiter than oak, that looks great under the low toxicity environmentally friendly lacquer I like to use. It’s distinctive grain again much like oak also looks great when whitewashed or pickled like in my piece “Back in the Saddle Again” or bleached like the seat on the piece pictured ” A place to Hang My Hat” or painted with milk paint as the back elements are on that piece as well.It also works exceptional well for an ebonized or black finishes and other dyed or stained finishes as the wood accepts stains and dyes very readily not blotchy and uneven as many woods tend to. Ash also does not tend to splinter and blow out when being shaped and though it is not the easiest wood to carve it holds a nice crisp line. So here is to you ash a fine wood indeed.
As a footnote, I recently bought an ash log from a local tree service and had it sawed into 2 1/2” thick slabs and have it drying outside my shop which should take about 2 years.I have no plans as of yet for the wood but I do have a couple of years to think about it
I belong to a loose collective of woodworkers called “White Cross Woodworkers”(WCW) that has shared shop space for the last ten years . Together we work in a10,000 sq/ft building and collectively own most of the large machinery while each of us maintains there own bench space. This past fall we made the decision to showcase all of our talents by creating a gallery ,open to the public, in the shop and now after month’s of toil The Gallery at WCW is open. If you are in the Chapel Hill North Carolina area please stop by at 3315 NC 54 West and view the many talents that WCW represents.
In my bio I have a line that says “I am inspired by the world around me” but besides being a glib line what does that really mean. What is my process to come up with my next idea or solution (design) for a client.The sources of my inspiration seems a topic for some self reflection and more than a brief article but here is an attempt.
Most of my ideas come from my sketch book ,and I keep them going back more than 20 years ,as I see things that interest me in both the natural world and the man made world I scribble them down. My scribbles though are often transformed into functional objects, if I see an architectural detail I like I might put it down as a detail in a table construction or a chair, so often I do not know the source of the original object. I also have another habit with my sketch books which is to create design problems and then sometimes spend years working out solutions. My “Little Big Man” series which I wrote about in the blog is a good example of a design problem I set up for myself in coming up with ideas for multifunction furniture. I have had one ongoing design problem running through many sketch books to design a simple yet elegant 36” diameter kitchen table that sells for under 1500$.I have called this my Noguchi problem or my search for my own Noguchi after Isamu Noghuchi’s brilliant yet simple 3 piece 1944 coffee table. I also just aimlessly doodle in my sketch books with no apparent object in mind and this sometimes is how I have come up with my most sculptural ideas. My Torso series came about that way as I identified some errant doodles as looking like human torso’s and devoted a few pages to developing the idea. At some later point in time when needing an idea for a gallery show I was in I went back to those drawings and developed them as cabinets.
Going to my sketch books is always a good first step for me but just as often I like to do some research around an idea and find sources outside my own head. At that point I start to look through my own design library of both furniture and architecture and look not only for other peoples specific design ideas but look for interesting details I can take out of context and use in other ways. I once found an image of a lid for turned vessel and used it as an idea for a table base. I also, like most scour the internet for cool ideas and images as sources of inspiration. Finally my last act is to take a walk not necessarily a walk in nature or a walk looking for inspiration but a walk to clear my thoughts and make me more receptive to the ideas rolling around in my head. Motion, just the act of moving forward has always been a way for me creatively problem solve or just clear the slate and let the ideas flow.
In this post I have excerpted a couple of segments from my interview with Molly Matlock on her radio program Inside the Artists Studio which originally aired on WCOM Carrboro,NC on December 1,2008. The titles to the audio clips are as follows, please click on the highlighted text to listen and as always please feel free to comment or contact me.
Thoughts on function vs form
Do I have a style of my own?
What is my process?
The building of the torso pieces
My favorite piece to build
The piece pictured here Little Big Man 2 is the latest in a series of multifunction forms that I have been exploring over the last few years and I thought might be a good opportunity for me to discuss a little about my design process. The idea of a multifunction form as I defined it was to come up with a visually interesting sculptural form that could be turned or rotated and take on not only a different look but also change function. My process is one in which I do a fair amount of sketching on paper until I arrive at some ideas that I feel are worthy of further development.From there I go to the computer and begin to work on issues of scale, proportion and color and create 3d models which give me a feel for what the finished piece might look like.But invariable I end up building scale models usually using the actual materials I plan for the full sized piece because it is the only way I can truly get a real feel for how all the elements in piece work together.The process in not necessarily a linear one and many times I go back to paper and pencil before I get an idea to the point I am ready to build and often in the process of building I go back to the drawing board. From the beginning of the design process I started drawing this form in pairs and was intrigued by the way they could work both individually and as pair and made the decision I should build two of them and sell them as a pair.From there the decisions got more difficult, I struggled mightily on not the form so much but how to finish it. My bent in most of my work is to highly personalize my pieces with surface designs,images, color and texture and I explored them all here but somehow I ended up with a much more minimalist approach, a little black paint and a clear lacquer finish.The motivation for this could be I was just exhausted from my own process and wanted to finish the piece or I thought it worked better in a simpler form, in the end like all my work it is a work in process and I will let you be the judge as to its success.If you are interested in the piece please comment and give me your feed back if you are interested in purchasing please visit my etsy site.
Listen live on the internet stream on wcom radio Carrboro NC as I sit down with Chatham Arts director Molly Matlock on Tuesday December 1 and we discuss all thing art on her weekly radio show “Inside the Artist Studio”.Please tune in and give me some feed back on how it went or just ask me to better explain just what it is I was trying to say.
Hi all and welcome to my blog I am the furniture maker and designer Erik Wolken. As I enter into this new venture my hope is to be better able to connect with the community of people both making and buying contemporary art furniture , for lack of a better word. To that end the goal for my blog is to keep you up to date on where my work can be seen, new work as it emerges from the the sawdust and ideas for new pieces. I also want to point out cool work I see as I wander around the internet and mention happenings in the furniture world that might be of interest to others. So let’s go
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