Screen

I started with thoughts of; what is a screen, what is privacy, and what does it mean to block?

While useful and important questions, I discovered those questions were much too speculative to begin an already abstract project. So I started building with what I knew. Tasked to construct a public object with aesthetic and secluding properties to pair with the chair constructions I looked to them for inspiration. Where would they live, and what would be surrounding them? And I identified two constraints that I wanted to move forward with the duality of cartoon and nature.

I wanted to construct a jungle for my chairs to live around, with sculptural vines and trees. So I started with a minimal drawing, one that adhered to my earlier geometric principles. Smoothed edges let the lines weave somewhere between nature and a bubbly cartoon. The grid gave me structure but also allowed for a continuity of geometry.

The decision to move to metal was a practical one, I learned from the chairs that there is a huge material loss in wooden curves and bending metal made more sense for the thin lines and fabric patchwork I wanted to create. A heavy steel frame set a bounding for this pattern, like looking through a window right to the jungle.

With time and refinement, the lines began to connect and pass through each other. This is when I decided to complicate things by cracking the 2-dimensional plane directly down the middle. Between the heavy steel frames, rods flow like the natural forms of a vine growing through a rock. Barely separated rods impose tension and natural movement of the visual drift, inferring a connect the dots form of continuity. Unpredictability of constructed randomness led to an asymmetrical set of frames.

The planes of the drawing needed a further dimension to stand for sitting or standing height, provided by the hinging mechanism holding the heavy box frame together. Here I taught myself to weld, attaching metal to metal in a monolithic solid landscape.

With a substantial environment already constructed, I returned to my original questions. what is a screen, what is privacy, and what does it mean to block? The metal construction did little to “block” in the conventional sense. The “canopy” had to be effective. I rediscovered trace, or “bumwad”. It has a fascinating texture, enough transparency to let forms come through, but enough cloudiness to “block” in the conventional sense.

This screen creates an ambient environment and an effective room separator. Heavy metallic box frame is contrasted by thin continuous rods and fragile ephemeral drapery, in a complex world between whimsy and statuesque.