Fómhar - Weaving Abundance into Furniture

Category: Furniture

Fómhar is a forager's cabinet for processing wild-harvested plants, made entirely from regeneratively harvested Irish woodland materials. The frame is sweet chestnut, joined with traditional bridle joints. The body is woven directly onto the frame in split hazel, using no mechanical fixings beyond a single brass pivot pin for the lid. Below the worktop sit four basket drawers, each made from a different foraged material, hazel, willow, bramble and nettle, harvested in a different season using a distinct, endangered Irish craft technique: splitwood weaving, skeining, stem weaving and cordage making. Every material in the piece regenerates when harvested. Coppicing hazel and sweet chestnut opens the woodland canopy, allowing wildflowers, ground flora and pollinators to return. Willow regrowth provides early-season pollen. Bramble and nettle harvesting controls their dominance, giving other species room to establish. Research undertaken for this project found that actively coppiced Irish woodlands sustain significantly higher biodiversity than unmanaged equivalents, evidence that mindful harvesting, not non-intervention, is what keeps native woodland alive. Because the cabinet uses no synthetic fixings, every woven element sits in routed grooves and can be repaired or rewoven by hand. At the end of its working life, the entire piece will biodegrade. Fómhar argues that the most natural material available to designers today is one we have spent seventy years cutting down and discarding rather than cultivating: coppiced native wood, harvested with intent and rewoven into the objects we use every day.

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