Ice Chair, March, 2005, 12 second clip from 7 minute video.

When I began to think about designing and building a chair for the 2005 Cranbrook Chair Show, my first intuition was to build a chair from unconventional materials. My previous work addressed my acclimation to a Michigan winter, so the decision to use ice as a building material came easily to me.

Additionally, the poetry of Nancy Willard and Joseph Campbell led me to think of the chair beyond its traditional function of providing support for a seated person. The following musing from Joseph Campbell was particularly influential: "If you think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth."

Prior to my start of the ice chair project, I wrote in my journal: "Chair as object, chair as sculpture, chair as metaphor. From nature, to nature; from the earth, back to the earth. All chairs start as earthly materials and eventually return to the earth. The chair is completely connected to, and dependent upon, its environment. Using materials from a location or environment, I will continue my investigations into the land."

Category:

Comedy

Tags:

• ice
• chair
• cranbrook academy of art
• detroit
• michigan
• cold
• snow