Sep 20 2011
Garrendenny Lane interviews Sasha Sykes of Farm 21
I’m delighted to share with you an interview with Sasha Sykes of Farm 21. She recently launched new designs and I was delighted to see her workshop and get a sneak peak of some plans for new designs.
Can you tell us about your new screen? I understand Eileen Gray provided some of your inspriration for it – can you tell us more about that?
The Screen was commissioned by the National Museum (as part of their Joint Purchase scheme with the CCOI) and it is on view there in the Furniture Galleries from the end of July. They approached me to purchase a piece to go alongside a chair they bought previously (the Carlow Chair) and I knew it was an awesome opportunity to do something really challenging and fantastic.
Their curator Jennifer Goff is possibly the world’s leading expert on Eileen Gray and gave me a guided tour of Gray’s work (and life) one Monday afternoon for literally hours, and her passion really inspired me. As the Carlow Chair had been a reinterpretation of an old classic (the Sligo chair) I decided to go down a similar road and reinterpret Gray’s infamous laquer screen, but using the materials and processes I have spent the last decade developing.
A lot of my design ideas come from a mixture of design traditions, modern art, philosophy, travel and my daily walks around the farmlands here in Carlow, and the concept for the screen came to me in Berlin when I was looking at the torn-down wall there, and considering the role of walls in our histories. The estate wall that ends near our drive entrance ended up inspiring much of the organic material that went into my screen, with woodland debris at the base, going from grasses and mosses and lichens up to ferns, brambles and ivy hanging down over the top, and hints of life in the form of egg shells, feathers and butterflies. I really love to use local material in my work, especially the often-overlooked plants that form so much of the visual landscape for us and are really particular to this corner of the world we live in.
There’s a UV barrier in the resin to help protect those wonderful colours and stop it fading over time. The process of embedding them in the water-clear resin took nearly a year. They were then stacked up like brickwork and threaded with a steel bar from top to bottom. I kept it dense at the base and progressively lighter towards the top -the transparency of the clear resin allows a naked view through, and renders the privacy aspect useless but physically you still feel the boundary provided by ‘the wall’. I love this idea of tearing down what the old 6ft wall was meant to provide: privacy for the occupants within and “keep out everyone else”. It may also be a bit of the Protestant guilt….
Your Family Silver pieces are lovely too – what was your inspiration for these?
Inheritance: What it stands for, what it means, what people expect, what people physically receive, what people mentally receive… all these things that lead to people unconsciously carrying the past in their increasingly modern lives. How many people do you know that have a few odd forks and knives from their granny swimming around the back of the cutlery drawer? And of course one man’s trash is another man’s treasure….. I loved working with the knives and forks as they are so ‘male/female’ and the connotations with this and their physical forms are endless.
I’d zone out for hours when I was figuring out the best positioning for the different pieces – it was like trying to sum up a married couple in one stance. And cutlery as we know it is such a recent thing – it’s only been around really for about 250 years. I’m onto Stage II of the Family Silver now and doing casts of old silver teapots, which is challenging but they look incredible so I am excited…..
One of your first pieces was the Straw Cube if I remember correctly and you made it for your father’s birthday present. What other materials have you used within cubes and coffee tables?
Yes, it was for my dad’s 60th birthday – I wanted to give him something symbolic to represent his life and years farming. He’s very traditional so it took him nearly to his 70th to get his head around it. I worked with many farmed and naturally abundant organic materials after that from wools and grains to lavender and mosses.
Then I progressed into using the clear resins to embed the organics and create a completely new and unique material that could be cut and shaped into all sorts of really functional objects and furniture pieces. It has been a challenge to preserve the fragility and colours of the materials, and create castings that a bubble-free and perfect.
It’s constantly evolving as I discover ways to dry and encapsulate new materials, and in recent years I have become very excited by lichens, thistles, wildflowers and seaweeds in particular as they have all come back to life in a new way in the resin. To be able to use these materials in a functional way, everyday, really excites me.
Your Horse Inside Coffee table was a bit hit at the ID&A Show – can you tell us about it please?
The Rubberbandits got me thinking …! The Horse Inside/Outside table is the first purely acrylic piece (without embedded organics) that I’ve done in a while, but i wanted to show something that incorporates my ideas and stories, but that could be reproduced easily.
I have a degree in Architecture and have been working in design for 15 years, yet my drawing skills are still terrible – except i can draw a horse’s rear perfectly because my Granny (a professional painter) taught me when I was about 10 years old, shortly before she passed away. I ended up using front and rear legs for either end, and they are actually faced 90 degrees to normal, but the effect is stronger with it being less literal. It’s a light hearted piece thats all about the form, but it’s extremely practical – it is made from acrylic which was designed for use on boats originally so it can withstand fantastic temperature ranges and it can be used either indoors or outdoors.
Do you think your pieces are more for exhibition spaces or for the residential home? Do you have many of your own pieces in your own home?
I make different pieces for different situations, but in recent years it seems I have been exhibiting new concept pieces once a year or so for an exhibition, and base much of the following work around this, not unlike a fashion show/collection. The original piece might not be sold off the stand but it inspires ideas for pieces for residential homes, and interior projects,which follow.
The Family Silver and country Wall are recent themes, and I’m working on a piece that is all about the Sea for the next show.
Like most plumbers who have leaking taps at home, I was pretty bad about having my own work around my house except for rejects and broken pieces. I did build a house last year however, and one of the conditions my husband put down at the start of the project was that we’d use my pieces throughout the space. It’s great actually, cause you can learn so much more about the minute details of their functionality by living with them, especially with dimensions. It sounds obvious but a studio/workshop isn’t always real life!
Are there any other shows coming up for you? Do you try to launch something new at each show?
Yes, I try to launch new work twice a year – some more organic/decorative and some more conceptual/ideas based…..If it’s not a new concept it’ll be something that is technically new and pushing the process and materials forward. The Shogun stool I showed at the ID&A was the first time I had used a form/flop techinique as i call it, so I could get the curve in the top but still incorporate the delicate rosepetals. The last show I did was the Celebration of Craftmanship & Design .
Are you working on something new at the moment?
Yes, I have a few different projects on the go – one is developing the flop/form technique to make interesting shapes that can be cast without damaging my organic materials. I love working with seaweeds and am making a piece with these and various shells I have collected over the years. Shells are so incredible but they can look twee in presentation, so I’ve been working to make something very bold and modern that an intergalactic traveller would be happy to sport in his ship.
I am also working on a project I call ‘Disabled Furniture’ which is actually about the furniture being disabled rather than the user, and how we approach broken, damaged or fragile furniture, and injecting antique and recycled pieces with extremely contemporary elements.
With the organic materials I was obsessively collecting gorse earlier in the year and that is going into a very functional chest/cabinet. The Family Silver is inspiring a whole new body of work using rubber moulds, and my Sunny The Sunflower kids lamp is heading into its third year of development now (aghhhh!!). I am lucky in that almost every project is new and unique, and Ilearn more and develop more each time. I really enjoy the interaction with clients that making bespoke work allows, and the piece becomes a real collaboration. It can be very emotional – when I unveiled the last piece both myself and the client were in floods or tears:-)
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