Give up dominion over your Materials.
Greetings All, thanks for your patients. I am back from the disastrous system failure with a new computer on a new (to me) platform. All homage Steve Jobs!
Anyway, jumping right back in. I was reading just this morning a thread regarding storage of “off cut” material in wood shops. Most entries were on the order of: cost to much, gets out of hand, can’t be bothered to sort it, store it in the dumpster.
AAARRGGHHHH! One guy, a retired guy from New England said that they had the habit of keeping things sorted by specie, size, and thickness for first possible usage when a job list came through. But there did seem to be a general lack of respect for the materials.
Which leads me into the current topic, the almost reverential treatment of the materials I witnessed at ICFF. It seems that many of designers and craftspeeps were interested not only in showcasing their chosen materials in the best possible light but also demonstrate their dominion over the material. By exerting their will and plying their craft, they coerce the wood into intricate paterns, beat it into shape and force it into sublime curves. When making custom molding for picture framing, I routinely asserted my dominance over wood, straightening it, or poisoning it to reveal a certain color. But lately, with these recent successes, it has been the materials that speak to me, a slab of glass that tells me it is a paisley, the raw oak limbs, the splinter of pine board that showed me its face. I come to realize that the less I do, the less I try to assert my will and dominate the material, the more successful my work.
The cherry wood tables, which are a great design, required much heavy machinery, thick coats of lacquer, and lots of biscuits and glue, are arguably not my greatest success. Where as the Paisley table which I ran over with an angle grinder and dropped on a few sticks of the same cherry wood feels a much greater success.
This is the point I hope to actually engage some conversation on the point of dominon over material. I would be interested to hear any opinions about which techniques work for them. An all out assault on the material to bend it to your will or a minimalist leave no trace approach to final out come.
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