Summer 2020
Gregory BesonA collection like this did not begin as a sketch or even as a conceptual idea. It began as a conversation. With friends, family, lovers, clients and students. With authors deceased, yet ever present in conversation and dialogue. Definitions of home are for each one of us to conjure and create.
It is my belief the pieces of furniture and artifacts which populate our interior spaces are essential to making a home. The rituals we perform, routes we travel and habits we repeat each day are the physical actions taken which manifest a home feeling. The artifacts which provide the stage for these acts are indivisible collaborators, providing the armature of a shelter beyond walls.
A walnut cutting board gifted for a new apartment allows the recipient to create a notch, a cut each time they nourish themselves and others. Breaking of the bread, recorded across the grain. Yet not all marks are physical and seeable. Experiences, both profound and mundane create notches in our memories.
Be it a fixture in daily routine, or an accessory seen in passing, these artifacts are what hold together the home space we create. When moving, does not the feeling of home slowly evaporate with each picture frame removed, each book packed away? Artifacts weave our experience into the present by revealing a past and giving a reassurance for the future. That chair will still be waiting for me when I return at the end of the day as it sat patiently for my mother for so many years. This knowledge can offer reassurance, continuity and a sense of place.
This small collection of varied typologies has been created for you to weave into your home. Made singularly of American Walnut wood they offer opportunity for a lifelong communion with a material. Patient slow growth rewarding us with its rich texture and tone in its second life. I wish you could smell the wood being cut, it is both sweet and bitter.
Each is a surface to present the artifacts of a life being lived, one being shared. Spring cherry blossoms in a vase on a sunny afternoon. A single candle on a cold November evening. A new friend sharing a meal, at dusk on the summer solstice. These memories we create, the spaces in which we live each day, this is our home.