I’ve been collaborating with Gavin and Alice of Full Grown Furniture this year, making drawings and prints in response to their innovative approach to shaping trees into growing furniture.
After being friends and admiring each other’s work for many years, we decided this year to begin to explore ways to connect more creatively. During four days working in their Chair Orchard this spring, I collected lots of charcoal drawings which have developed into a whole series of charcoal monoprints exploring their work with trees.
Pop-up in the Piggery
We’d arranged a day together to review what I’ve been creating in the studio. However, since all local venues were busy with the Wirksworth Arts Festival, I impulsively suggested a pop-up exhibition for them at my accommodation – a cleverly converted and now rather posh piggery on a farm nearby.
Gavin was excited to see how I’d captured the character and movement of his trees and the way my charcoal monoprints echoed aspects of the finished furniture designs he’s striving for.
Some themes emerged during our conversation about the work – the tension between constraint and freedom, a dialogue between intended geometry and naturally developing forms, the decision-making processes of trees and the generation-spanning timescales necessary to learn how to think like a tree.
As well as getting their insightful feedback on the new work I’d made, I was also treated to a visit to the workshop to see harvested pieces in their next phase of making.
Why collaborate?
This has been a creatively refreshing collaboration – far more than just a being a new site to draw in, a residency is a way of challenging my practice. It prompts novel ways of doing things and disrupts comfortable patterns. I can tell already that what I’ve learned here will feed all my work, technically, conceptually and emotionally too.
What’s next?
Perhaps exhibiting together next year, maybe offering some of the monoprints to collectors, certainly more drawing days in the furniture field and printmaking projects in the studio.
We talked about how much we’d enjoyed this bringing together of two and three dimensions and knocked around some ideas to continue the collaboration – there will be more Full Grown adventures…
Read about part one of our collaboration here.
Find out more about Full Grown here.