Tyrella Chair, Lines and Squares Chair

This, the Tyrella Chair, was completed a while ago. The original drawing was made in response to Tyrella beach in County Down, Northern Ireland; a really special place for us; particularly for Sally going back to childhood. We're exhibiting sample pieces such as this at Sunday's Kids.Modern.



Sally has been going hard at producing at designing and making a set of lovely new knitted animals, cushions and bags; I'm photographing them tomorrow for upload to her blog ahead of Sunday. So, this chair's fragmentary elements are cooked out of the quite particular and diverse form, both natural and interrupt-ary artificial, around the territory.



When the sun comes out, it's the best kept secret in Northern Europe.





Last time there I read Solaris by Stanislaw Lem; the wormcasts and tidal flats gave face to the surface and described phenomena of the planet-organism.



Back there this Summer.


Also working on the Lines and Squares Chair. Sally chose the text, from A.A. Milne's classic When We Were Very Young (1924). It's one of (our boy) Syd's favourites. So first was to escape the beautiful E.H. Shepard imagery and to engage the words. There is a residual awareness of the recent typeface work but I wanted to play and distort more, directly (and sometimes obviously, clumsily) letting the words do what they say they are doing.



This is the chair, sprung, webbed and upholstered to the stage ready for covering by Sally.



And her start on the stitch. I may need to draw more directly onto the fabric. At the moment it is stitched through a paper print of the artwork but this way it can be tricky to judge the line; in this case the radiuses and tensions are important, so we are mulling over our options for the most successful translation.