Waterfall Bench for COLLECT 2021
COLLECT 26th Feb - 2nd March
We are showing our Waterfall Bench as part of the Design-Nation showcase at COLLECT : art fair for contemporary craft and design.
The Waterfall Bench began with a private commission for a bench for a bedroom and this new design will be a limited edition of three. Angus conceived a concept for a delicate waterfall of water like you see in the burns around us. Fluid, flowing lines is a characteristic of many of Angus’s designs and as I write this the burn (stream) outside our house is gushing and burbling and full of snow-melt. We live and work in the U shaped Upper Tay Valley with hundreds of burns draining into the river.
Our workshop is a mile downstream from the lovely Moness Waterfall, immortalised by our National Bard Robbie Burns in 1787 in the Birks o’ Aberfeldy song. The burn flows past our workshop and into the River Tay as it meanders through Aberfeldy, then onto Dunkeld, Perth, Dundee and into the North Sea.
Angus has many techniques to help him achieve flowing shapes in his work but our signature technique is steam-bending. This allows us to use small sections of local air-dried ash (Fraxinus excelsior) which bends particularly well. This important native tree produces a lovely pale hardwood that has often been often over-looked.
The seat is steam-bent ash slats which echo the curves of the sliced-and-bent back-slats that provide the understructure. The back slats are linked with a hand-turned walnut dowel at the point of the slice. They are fixed above with a curved steam-bent back-rest.
In this delicate bench Angus has celebrated traditional jointing techniques with walnut details. There are walnut extended loose bridles in the mitred joints between the arms and front leg, and walnut wedges to the through tenons of the front rail. A similar approach of accentuating constructional details is also be seen in Japanese woodwork.
Angus likes to use ash for one-off statement pieces as this cream-coloured hardwood has sometimes been seen as too ordinary for fine furniture making but it should not be taken for granted. Ash are a common native tree that provides an important ecological niche, vital for bio-diversity. Their canopy allows high light penetration and their leaves create a nutrient-rich rapidly-degradable leaf litter which allows them to support over a 1000 species above and below ground including fungi, lichen and invertebrates. Ash became even more important after elm was almost totally wiped out by Dutch Elm Disease, as they provide a similar niche to elm.
Across the UK, ash trees are currently grappling with Ash Dieback Infection. This fungal disease originated in intensively bred saplings imported into the UK. The spores are windblown across the country and are causing widespread disease. Fortunately we have found the timber is still healthy and good for fine furniture making.
As with Covid, tree diseases are a reminder that we must care for the natural world, and be wary of transporting intensively grown, over-crowded, living things around the world.
COLLECT is an international art fair for contemporary craft and design held in London each year and presented by the UK Crafts Council. Last year it was held in Somerset House for the first time, and looking back it feels like another world. During the course of the show we were probably in close contact with thousands of people including makers, galleries and visitors from across the globe.
This year we are showing with a group of selected makers from Design Nation, an organisation representing designer-makers working and living in the UK. It was set-up by influential (FT) journalist and craft champion Peta Levi twenty years ago. Angus is a Design Fellow for Design Nation and first met Peta Levi in 1992 when he was showing at New Designers - which Peta also established.
This year COLLECT is a virtual show and published on Artsy. The show is live 26th February - 2nd March. To read more about the talks and events visit UK Crafts Council - Collect and talks by Design-Nation members here.