Ash Rise at RBGE
Ash Rise at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 13th September 2024 - 12th January 2025.
Pair of Clova Chairs, John Hope Gateway, RBGE.
Ash Rise is a project organised by Scottish Furniture Makers Association in partnership with the Association of Scottish Hardwood Sawmillers, supported by Creative Scotland and Scottish Forestry Commission. Ash Rise involves a touring exhibition of furniture and art responding to the beauty and potential of ash trees and their timber, and the tragedy of ash dieback disease, which is currently devastating our native ash trees.
Ash Rise is at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, in the John Hope Gateway Gallery 13th September 2024 - 12th January 2025
For Ash Rise Angus has created a new design and made a pair of Clova Chairs. They have been a design exercise in paring back the number of components to achieve a comfortable carver chair in just four components.
Each Clova Chair has two dovetail joints, three legs, four components and five steambends and uses timber extremely efficiently.
One section of ash has been sliced and bent to flow in two directions like a fork in a river. This component forms the back-rest and the back leg of the tripod chair plus the stretcher that supports the seat. Another flowing double bend supports the back-rest and forms the arm-rests and the front legs. The seat is curved for comfort and all components are traditionally jointed for strength and beauty. There is an unusual large angled dovetail joint at the back of the seat which joins it to the backrest.
Angus is obsessed with ‘flow’ both visually, and practically when helping steamed wood fibres flow round a former. Steam-bending is zen-like with the whole mind and body quietly absorbed and working with a natural material to help it achieve unexpected forms. The steam bends are achieved by Angus and our furniture makers bending the wood over jigs and formers. The arms and front legs component takes four makers working in unison and there is a video showing a similar bend in Fountain Seating public commission journal post. The back-rest and under-structure component takes two makers using a complex jig.
The Clova Chairs are comfortable, contemporary, carver chairs. Some design elements such as the narrow back, curved arms and tapering seat are found in Scottish caquetoire chairs and the design has been re-worked by Scottish designers since the 16th Century e.g. the Provands’s Lordship Chair dated 1582. Stephen Jackson, Senior Curator at National Museums of Scotland, describes the caquetoire chair as “quintessentially Scottish” . They were most commonly found in Eastern Scotland and the Angus Glens. As Glen Clova may be the most beautiful of the Angus glens we have used the name for the Clova Chairs.
A feature length film about using timber in Scotland and the problem of ash dieback disease has also been commissioned and can be seen at the exhibition. It shows the diseased trees being felled at Killearn Farm in Stirlingshire in 2021 and Angus making the Clova Chairs and talking in our woodland.
Resilience Bench in Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Frame is steam-bent olive ash and the seat is wind-blown oak.
We have been worried about ash dieback for a decade now and have watched with sadness as it becomes more visible in our landscape. We were first alerted to the problem of the disease by native woodland forester and academic Rick Worrell. Rick is one of the collective who own our bluebell woodland and was commissioned to write a paper for the Scottish Government on ash dieback in 2013, and he was one of the first to record ash dieback in Scotland when he noticed it affecting ash sapling in our bluebell wood.
Angus first responded to ash dieback in his designs in 2016 when he designed the Resilience Bench for the After the Storm exhibition at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. The Resilience Bench was later exhibited at the first London Craft Fair and was bought by the RBGE for Inverleith House where it remains on display. It was featured in the Financial Times in 2019.The wood for the oak seat was sourced from a tree blown over in the garden during Storm Andrea (2012). The wood was quite ‘scruffy’ and Angus decided to ebonize it with scorching - a process known as Shou Sugi Ban in Japan. This process hardens the wood and makes it more resilient. This dark oak was combined with a lovely olive ash as this was the beginning of Ash Dieback. We wanted to bring attention to the importance of caring for our native trees and managing for future health and resilience to both storms and disease. This includes managing woodland to bring in light, support regeneration, and improve bio-diversity.
The Clova Chairs in Ash Rise has featured in Wallpaper magazine.
The Ash Rise exhibition moves to Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries, from 18 January to 22 March and Inverness Museum and Art Gallery from 29 March to 17 May 2025.
Ash Rise includes work by ten members of Scottish Furniture Makers Association and ten selected artists and it contains a fascinating range of responses to the Ash Rise project including turned and scorched vessels by Duke Christie, an Orkney Chair by Kevin Gauld and a concrete and ash guitar by Taran Guitars x Nicholas Denny Studio.
