sitting around some more
A BUTCHER'S #67
chair choice
this impressive display of plastic chairs caught my eye at a market in Mexico 30 years ago (almost an arrangement of the national flag?)
rethinking a chair
A show we had at spring in 2007, inCONSTRUCTION showcased aspects of construction and design that challenge conventional thinking. We were happy to be able to present excellent pieces from a series titled Archeology of the invisible by Maxine Naylor & Ralph Ball. They explored variations on the idea of the stacking chair, focused on re-interpreting, experimenting, re-thinking found discarded chairs, selected because of their everyday ordinariness.
Polypropagation - The top orange chair of this polyprop stack is a Robin Day original from 1963. It is the originator of all the variations that are to follow. (This was found discarded half buried in muck).
Blackstack- Highlighting the beauty of Robin Day’s chairs with a repetition of its stacking framework.
Co-dependent - Two broken chairs, each with three legs (a white plastic garden chair and a designer chair from Matthew Hilton) are united and depend on each other to remain upright. Cool!
Of course US Customs couldn’t believe, or understand why anyone would pay to ship common plastic chairs 3000 miles from England. Not only that, but they were broken and dirty - ‘You know you can buy them here new for $10?’. So of course they opened everything up, determined to find where the stash was hidden.
Day time
My parents were fans of the designer Robin Day and bought most of the furniture for their first house from Hille (click for a fantastic furniture rabbit hole). So I grew up with it - lucky me!
Robin Day’s neatly stacking, injection molded polypropylene chair was a breakthrough in chair design - cheap, elegant and incredibly utilitarian; popular in schools, cafés, hospitals etc. with numerous variations and imitations over the years. Over 14 million have been sold.
seating for eating
A photo I see every day as it’s in front of my desk. Designed by my dad, it shows the workers’ refectory/canteen at Fawley power station.
The chairs - are they by Robin Day? My thought is ‘probably’ but I can’t find any variation of the classic 1963 orange polyprop chairs with an open back like these. Anyway, I really like the photo!
endpiece
We used to go to the Yucatan in Mexico, which was steadily undergoing noticeable change. One year I started seeing strange bits and pieces along the straight road with jungle on both sides, heading out of town. People were moving in to inhabit the jungle area.
When there’s no number or address and no house or any kind of habitation visible from the road, just an opening or track leading into the undergrowth, there’s a need for differentiation between neighbors, spurring innovative solutions, to say ‘I live here’
Repurposing trash with new significance - a simple yet effective means of conveying information to differentiate from neighbors - ‘I live here’ Mexico 2007
I remember that one well!
Yet another amazing exhibition. Ralph and Maxine are absolute rockstars - what a thought provoking body of work. It makes me proud to have hosted them at Spring!