Ben Grieve-Johnson, Language Gathers and so does this Table (TABLES, CHAIRS, DESKS 2022)

We are lucky enough to be living through a time of civilisational decline. The stench of decay flavours everything we do, think, and make. There are at least two ways one can react to this moment. The first is to double-down on totalised technological reason like Scott Morrison would double down on a lie: try to design our way out of problems the nature of which we will never understand because it lies in the very essence of design itself. The alternative is more humble: to comport ourselves in such a way as to see that the problem and solution are one in the same. Rather than demanding the world yield as undifferentiated matter and information to be used, exchanged, designed, we might learn to notice and appreciate what is already given. For me, this is what Windsor style furniture is. Its joinery utilises the natural strength of a split, straight-grained log, and becomes stronger as that log slowly dries out and moves with the seasons. It escapes the demand to industrially kiln-dry every plank of wood until it’s as close to lifeless as possible, and requires no intensive production techniques. It also looks familiar, at once as furniture and yet also as a vital expression of nature. The legs, still recognisable as sticks from the tree that produced them, imply a posture that reminds us of how an animal presents itself to the world. A broad splay elicits the ease of a creature at rest; a narrow footprint minimises its presence as though to hide. Windsor furniture speaks to us, and I think that’s the sort of furniture we need right now. This is the second iteration of my Language Gathers Windsor-style dining table, which has involved a process of experimentation and tool fabrication to be able to craft in the same manner as a chair. It will seat 8 or so and is made from beautifully coloured, air-dried Tasmanian Blackwood. Drowned forty years ago by the rushed flooding of one dam in political retaliation for the blocking of another, more famous Tasmanian dam by the High Court, the wood itself retells us this story of environmental vandalism that had proven all too easy to forget.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.