2023 Edition

This project started in 2018 as a response to the reductive processes that go into producing traditionally made furniture and lighting.

The first item in this series of work was made and conceived while studying and practicing furniture design and making at the Jam Factory- a centre for craft in Adelaide, South Australia.

In this one building there are four studios; furniture, ceramics, jewellery and glass. Working in the furniture studio I was able to observe the differences in the ways the other studios were able to work with their materials- for the most part they were able to work in much more fluid ways. Glass, metal and clay are able to be formed and reconstituted, allowing much more fluidity in the life of a material. Traditional methods for making furniture, however, tended to restrict making to finite and final choices, the steps to making an object in this way were irreversible. “Measure twice cut once” as they say, and consign your component to its fate!

The inability to easily recycle anything made from wood led me down a path to investigate the simplest principles of making, landing me at what are truly the first principles of anything made; atomic structure.

This simple, beautiful and elegant system of infinite reuse, refined over millennia, became something I wanted to adapt to the built world.

Initially I made objects using wooden spheres, but eventually graduated to something more practicable, more readily available and something with a great and untapped cultural and environmental weight; the golf ball.

Initially I thought the golf ball might be only good for a prototyping material, but soon I realised there was something to be said for these little robust balls of plastic and rubber.

Each ball is collected from golf courses and the scrub surrounding them by a network of people who make a living doing this. Their best golf balls are resold to golfers, and their low quality balls I buy. These balls would otherwise see no use again, virtually unrecyclable they would only otherwise find themselves being hit as ‘paddock balls’ likely ending up consigned to break down in waterways or lost in scrub.

Once these balls are collected by me they are drilled out in a drill press, effectively turning them into large beads. After this they are strung together under immense tension, simultaneously being crushed together and pulled apart in their chosen orientation and geometry. Along with the geometry, the tension applied is crucial to their success and functional objects and this is done with a simple tool and a stepped weaving process that keeps them taught and together.

Here the construction of the golf ball comes into its own. Golf balls are immensely robust, yet subtle. Their spherical surfaces press into one another under tension, allowing them to bind together and form functional objects.

All of this is achieved with the simplest of tooling; cord, inverted clamps for spreading forces, thick metal pins for retaining tension, a hammer, and some adapted sailing equipment for quickly tying of cord.

Other than developing tooling, the main development is learning the language of the geometry. These are surfaces that aren’t practicable to be modelled on CAD or drawn, and so they must be developed and designed with the very material itself. Each geometry follows very simple rules, and isn’t infinitely divisible like dimensions of a regular piece of furniture. Multiples of golf balls must be used to reach heights and lengths permissible, and geometries play with each other, capable of distorting pattens in a retrospective manner. This is a challenge that is sometimes mind-bending, but very satisfying.

In the pursuit of learning this method, I have focused mainly on developing chairs. Chairs provide perhaps the greatest challenge to a furniture designer, and are the perfect vessel for pushing a material or process and showing its capability.