On the Decentered Human Nature as a Facilitator of Dialogue

Abstract

My thesis work utilizes an improvisational design method wherein each piece of furniture is made through collaboration with and in reaction to a specific fallen branch. Borne from a desire to design in a more embodied way, this work is a reaction against my previous methodology, which was to create form in the vacuum of my headspace and fastidiously lay out each and every step of a piece’s construction, rendering a beautiful but, to me, lifeless piece of furniture. By viewing the process of designing and making furniture through the dual lens of dialogical aesthetics and the post-human philosophy of speculative realism, I have experienced a heightened sense of empathy for my materials and for the branches with which I design. In working this way, the furniture I have made runs counter to my experience in contemporary American carpentry practices and the internet age’s commoditization of materials, processes, and time. Informed by the honesty and reverence for both material and process found in traditional Japanese carpentry, these pieces of furniture– occupied by branches instead of people– address the themes of functional specificity and the continuum of nature’s life cycles. By juxtaposing the rough natural form of a fallen branch with more polished furniture forms wrought by my hands, this body of work speaks to the bridging of relationships that have been allowed to deteriorate with the advent of technology, social media, and the capitalist “bottom line.”