ian laval furniture

It's never easy to describe style and 'art' -- other peoples' or one's own. In the real world it tends to emerge over time as a reflection of external influences and responses to events, more or less subtle, rather than an isolated creative act unrelated to what's going on around it.

In furniture we have an abundance of style labels from historic periods to current fashion: Jacobean, Early American, Restoration, Arts and Craft, Colonial, Art Nouveau, Scandinavian Contemporary, Shaker etc etc. And individual names: Hepplewhite, Adam, Chippendale, Duncan Phyfe, Sam Maloof etc.

Designers seek constantly to express newness and individuality. Invariably though, fashion -- that comforting area of social conformity -- is the result; until a new trend emerges, gets attention, fosters widespread copying and achieves the status of a label -- often with the interested support of commercial galleries.

Perhaps the current furniture-making period will come to be known as the "Studio Movement", recognised for the use not just of wood but of a much wider range of materials -- synthetics, metal, concrete, old aircraft parts, humour, irregularly wayward shapes. As remote technology increases its role in our lives and familiarity with common materials diminishes, old-fashioned wood and the hands-on skills needed to manipulate it are currently fading.

'Art' nowadays has more and more to do with external visuality ; it has shed much of its 'craft' connotation. 'Craft', which was once seen as the mainspring of art, is now, sadly, relegated to second-rank. 'Artists' not 'craftists' these days tend to fill the galleries -- often with objects that folk in past ages would daily step over and take for granted. To that extent some of the transient, craft-poor work taking gallery space and art-column headlines is a valid reminder that we are sadly less artful with ordinary materials and natural phenomena than were our ancestors.

My own approach to furnituremaking is something like this:
There are things to do with proportion that have appealed to human beings for centuries and were not designed by artists or anybody else -- any more than nature or the human body was designed on an artist's drawing-board. These proportions, delicate and elusive, were right then and we continue to respond to them much as we used to. Within them there is plenty of scope to arrange and re-arrange function, colour, texture etc. There's no logical reason why domestic furniture should remain the exclusive province of wooden trees -- but trees do happen to be pretty well universal, essential to life, renewable and accessible. Trees are full of beauty and surprises. They are consequential and directly connected to human experience. Trees are malleable. They both sharpen and respond to human skills precisely in the way they have done for centuries. I'm impressed at the way we cherish as antiques well-made wooden furniture from the distant past -- in part because it was made well, and by a real person. It emerged from our environment, was made by artful hands and fitted its purpose. It hit the right buttons.

I'll be immensely gratified if 300 years from now a family or a group of friends is sitting round my dining table (oak probably, because it embodies that sort of durability; circular or oval -- for that's the most convivial shape) chattering over an after-meal glass -- perhaps idly wondering whose hand made this old piece. If they're inquisitive enough they'll find a signature somewhere and recognise the unmistakable imprint of the human hand. Not perfect, for no hand is. But conscientiously sound enough to serve a universal daily job until the distant future becomes the distant past.

Ian Laval
Brentwood Bay BC