Wood Bending/Wood Breaking

2021

“In winter of 2020, just a year after the first wave of COVID-19 had hit many parts of the world, I found myself being confined once more to a small Dutch terraced house in Eindhoven, being a student at Design Academy at the time. There was a rather strict curfew in place, and even though the conditions were not ideal, did I finally manage to test a technique that had long been fascinating me: wood bending. A makeshift steam box in our garden shed together with a trial and error process allowed for some first results, and soon did I become bolder in looking for new forms that I could bend some trial wooden sticks against.

Maybe it was coincidence that the only shapes that seemed to promise successful bends when I looked around me were those of our living room chairs, but looking back I like to think otherwise… Eventually, I had gone through a lot of material. Some of the sticks were now bent successfully, though most of them were broken and seemingly lost for further use. But the thought that I had indeed managed to replicate the contours of our chairs, shaped some formerly straight wooden pieces into those exact forms, would not leave my mind.

So, soon after, I went back to those trial pieces, bent and broken, and started to put them together. I was interested in seeing what would happen if I tried to reuse all those pieces to create ‘something’ which might be able to convey the inherited meaning of the pieces’ parent chairs. The result became an object that could be seen as a chair on its own. Even though broken in use, do I believe that the reconstructed meaning of all those moulded forms and shapes stayed indeed intact or was able to transfer; fundamentally leaving me with the question, is something already a chair if we read it as such?”