I know what we did that summer Part 4 - Making
I know what we did that summer is made using salvaged hardwood. It is the third in a series of hanging cabinets. The idea started using timber with checks, splits and cracks. Material usually burnt, thrown away, or perhaps chopped up for use as handles or knobs.
Hanging cabinets engage with the role of display, of preciousness. These cabinets hang, sway, swing, spin and move. They start from a place of precariousness, holding those things important and loved, as they turn, dance and twist in the breeze.
The first in oak offsets scavenged from another workshop had to be able to hold together as an object without any of the usual structural joinery - no dovetails or mortise and tenons. It also pays homage to a series of wall cabinets made by George Ingham during the 1990s in scale and form.
The second uses the remaining piece of a flitch of blackwood from NSW north coast, cut down during road widening, hawked around the small workshops of Sydney from the back of a truck. It had savage shake through every piece, and though its density, colour and figure is gorgeous, it also had to be made around its structural fragility.
This piece is the simplest to date. Burning the piece meant it had to use joinery that had some hope of remaining intact. Sliding tapered dovetails which shrank and opened with the heat of the burn still stayed together, structurally functional with no glue though misshapen by fire.
The burning process was not attempting to deliver a yakisugi finish. The cabinet burnt to a much higher temperature and as eucalypt lacks the carbohydrate bulk of cedar’s spring growth, the piece did not char. It carbonised and disintegrated.
Yakisugi is not a pretty pattern. Nor is it known as shou shogi ban in Japan - that is a mispronuncation of the Japanese kanji. Japan’s climate is very humid, and timbers such as cedar rich in carbohydrate are quickly affected by mould and mildew, and insect attack. Charring the surface reduces the load of vulnerable material and provides a fire retardant surface.
Japan developed urban centres of some size from the eighth century onward, using timber plentiful in the temperate rainforests of the archipelago. Again and again, cities or towns were lost in terrible conflagrations, eerily familiar to Australians as we have watched Hobart, Maryville, Cobargo, Canberra burn. Yakisugi is not decoration, it is sombre necessity.
The burning of the piece is a meditation on our relationship with objects. As our futures are now mapped to the impacts of climate change, more and more of us will experience loss. Loss of homes, possessions, livelihoods, pets, even perhaps family and friends. When we pick through the ruins of our homes, what will we salvage? What will we value?
Will we start to see beauty in the pattern and texture left behind? Will we choose to preserve, to keep, to restore? The piece has been french polished using ruby shellac. This is a traditional material for conserving fire damaged pieces, though rarely pieces damaged to this extent. Shellac has been superseded by newer amyloid conservation techniques, but here it both stabilises and deepens the tone of the black, adding gloss, the piece like wet black kelp or a seal’s back.
And in its starkness as it slowly twists and turns, it is a memorial to the trees and forests we burnt in the summer of 2019-2020. To the forests lost before, and the losses to come.
Hanging cabinets engage with the role of display, of preciousness. These cabinets hang, sway, swing, spin and move. They start from a place of precariousness, holding those things important and loved, as they turn, dance and twist in the breeze.
The first in oak offsets scavenged from another workshop had to be able to hold together as an object without any of the usual structural joinery - no dovetails or mortise and tenons. It also pays homage to a series of wall cabinets made by George Ingham during the 1990s in scale and form.
The second uses the remaining piece of a flitch of blackwood from NSW north coast, cut down during road widening, hawked around the small workshops of Sydney from the back of a truck. It had savage shake through every piece, and though its density, colour and figure is gorgeous, it also had to be made around its structural fragility.
The burning process was not attempting to deliver a yakisugi finish. The cabinet burnt to a much higher temperature and as eucalypt lacks the carbohydrate bulk of cedar’s spring growth, the piece did not char. It carbonised and disintegrated.
Yakisugi is not a pretty pattern. Nor is it known as shou shogi ban in Japan - that is a mispronuncation of the Japanese kanji. Japan’s climate is very humid, and timbers such as cedar rich in carbohydrate are quickly affected by mould and mildew, and insect attack. Charring the surface reduces the load of vulnerable material and provides a fire retardant surface.
Japan developed urban centres of some size from the eighth century onward, using timber plentiful in the temperate rainforests of the archipelago. Again and again, cities or towns were lost in terrible conflagrations, eerily familiar to Australians as we have watched Hobart, Maryville, Cobargo, Canberra burn. Yakisugi is not decoration, it is sombre necessity.
The burning of the piece is a meditation on our relationship with objects. As our futures are now mapped to the impacts of climate change, more and more of us will experience loss. Loss of homes, possessions, livelihoods, pets, even perhaps family and friends. When we pick through the ruins of our homes, what will we salvage? What will we value?
Will we start to see beauty in the pattern and texture left behind? Will we choose to preserve, to keep, to restore? The piece has been french polished using ruby shellac. This is a traditional material for conserving fire damaged pieces, though rarely pieces damaged to this extent. Shellac has been superseded by newer amyloid conservation techniques, but here it both stabilises and deepens the tone of the black, adding gloss, the piece like wet black kelp or a seal’s back.
And in its starkness as it slowly twists and turns, it is a memorial to the trees and forests we burnt in the summer of 2019-2020. To the forests lost before, and the losses to come.
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