PIECES
Category: Furniture
Competitions: Home
My degree project PIECES pays hommage to traditional wooden furniture. Furniture that tell a story and have played an important role in our homes historically, even though they may no longer be needed or used in the same way today. Furniture like the freestanding and lockable linen cabinet or the kitchen sofa with built-in storage and a place to sleep. Furniture that is large in size and can be hard to fit into today’s smaller homes but which holds a huge sentimental value and is often handed down through several generations. So, what if I could weave a piece of my family history into a piece of furniture for the future? PIECES resulted in two handcrafted wooden cabinets that tell an important piece of my family history through the organic and repetitative shapes implemented into them. The cabinets are a tribute to my grandmother Aino and her three year younger sister Hanna born almost a century ago in a small town in north eastern Finland. It´s also my way of symbolically reclaiming their right to the land, forest and lakes around their childhood home that the sisters did not get a share of in the inheritance after my great-grandparents passed away. CABINETS: The two cabintes are named after Aino and Hanna and all major design decisions have been made with each sisters individual charactaristics in mind. For example the doors slides open in different directions as great aunt Hannas house door opened to the right while my grandmother Ainos opened to the left. They dont fully close, leaving a small section of the cabinet open to represent the closeness between the sisters. Ainos cabinet has all twig holes left as she was a person who took what she had and made the best she could out of it while Hanna appreciated finer materials. SHAPES: Cabinet Hanna has leather shapes inserted in the side panels of it. They are created out of leather strips 2 cm in width where each strips are shaped into two loops. One small and one large, representing the two sisters. 144 strips creates the two side panels in cabinet Hanna. Cabinet Aino has veneer shapes inserted into the sliding door. The shape is inspired by a lake by their childhood home called Soilu. The word Soilu an old Finnish word that means Northern light but is also used to describe waters movement on a lake surface. 1.744 veneer strips creates the shape in the door of cabinet Aino. MATERIAL: - Cabinet Hanna is made out of solid birch wood and leather strips (cow). - Cabinet Aino is made out of pine wood and birch veneer. Birch and pine grows naturally around the sisters childhood home and where they also kept cows as farmanimals for milk, meat and the leather. MEASUREMENTS (each cabinet): Hight: 175 cm Width: 70 cm Deapth: 27 cm
