When I started designing the first chair in this collection I wasn’t sure what I was doing or that this would even turn into a collection of multiple chairs. I had an idea that I needed and wanted to get out and I had a lot of unexplored feelings and thoughts informed by loss and love.
I remember the moments leading up to my paternal grandmothers death very vividly because they were traumatizing. She was very sick for years before she passed, which made her death both a relief but also heartbreaking. I had just turned 21 and spent my birthday in a way that she enjoyed, traveling. I remember being upset we didn’t talk on my birthday and I didn’t really understand why she would forget. My birthday, only a few days before hers, was very important to her. I didn’t talk to her on her birthday a few days later. I had problems with my phone but I also still upset about my birthday but more so still by some things she said me to a few weeks when I was at home; and worried at the time that she didn’t call me because she didn’t want to speak to me. The timezone difference coupled with her being in a facility also made it really difficult to chat, because she was not tech-savy. I figured I would instead make a her a little photobook of my travels in black and white when I returned stateside, because she loved black and white photos from my trips. When I returned from my trip I remember I started working on the photo edits and exports. I remember calling my mom to chat and see if she could pick-up the photos so they could be taken to her so I could talk to my grandma while she looked through them. We never got to that call. When I called my mom, I realized immediately, something was up. Her voice sounded different. I knew she wasn’t at home because her voice didn’t echo like it did at home but there was no background noise so I knew she wasn’t at the store. She wouldn’t tell me what was going on and hung up the phone. I remember calling the number I thought was my grandma’s phone number at the facility but it was actually her sister. They sounded so much alike, and that’s when I found out because I had mistaken my great aunt for her now deceased sister. I was standing in my tiny room in scoop (my college co-op) that already felt like the walls were closing in on a good day. I felt suffocated but I begged my dad to book me a ticket home right then because I couldn’t believe everything and I just felt so distant. I packed a bag while sobbing and called a lyft to Logan. I booked the wrong type of lyft. The entire time I felt guilt and stupid for being so upset about something my sister swore was just part of her illness and acting so childish. Everything was compounded by an intense sadness and isolation, because I was incredibly far from my family in Texas. I also really missed my grandma and I never got to show her the photos from trip. She traveled a lot when she was in better health. She loved going places. She was always on the move and encouraged my sister and I to travel and see the world too, so much so that she often helped fund those trips in various ways. I remember the days and weeks after this because she died at the start of my spring semester of my junior year. Literally a day or two before the first day of classes, and nearly exactly 6 months to the day after my sister and I almost died on vacation in a motor vehicle accident (which corresponded to the start of my junior year of undergrad).
Her death at the time was an inflection point in what became a series of deaths in my life, that started a few months prior to this in the previous spring/summer. As the youngest on both sides of my family, a lot of elders had already passed by the time either I was born or very young, so I didn’t have a close relationship to many of them. My grandmother’s death changed things for me and intensified the feelings and emotional turmoil I was already feeling about the death of complex individuals I had known for nearly my entire life. These feelings were further intensified by the PTSD from my own near death experience. I learned a lot about what happens after you die on this side. What happens with all of your stuff and how much stuff one can accumulate in a lifetime. Questions started tumbling about about in my head between the tears, grief, and numbness. I remember the rest of that semester being really strange and struggling (emotionally, mentally, and academically) a lot but also there were fun and good things that happened. I remember feeling very broken and needing more support than the previous semester when I had broken my dominant hand. I felt hollow. I remember friends who helped me both semesters and spending a lot of time in my co-op cooking for co-op and just cooking in general because my grandma liked to cook. It was a passion we shared and it helped me through navigate and manage my feelings. I made a few recipes inspired by my grandma. It was the semester that birthed my legendary lemon, lavender, cardamom cookies; a recipe i think she would have enjoyed since it utilized one of her favorite fruits and fruit she grew in her backyard. Things smoothed out a bit the rest of that year and no one else died until after graduation.
At the time, it felt funny or ironic that the summer after my graduation, the day I was supposed to start my new job, my paternal grandfather dies (this weirdly became a trend for a bit in my life). They divorced when my dad was a kid so I actually grew up with 6 pairs of grandparents, so it was also a bit kismet that he died about 18 months after his ex-wife. When he died I had a lot of different feelings and questions, some of the same ones from before but many new ones and I began to realize a lot about life, death, and the complexity of interpersonal relationships with blood relatives. Questions about community and family, in my mind their deaths were in conversation with each other. I had abstract and maybe philosophical questions about life and death. These joined the previous questions kicking around my head and became minor questions influencing the development and framework of this collection but as more people died the intensity of my sadness, weariness, and growing fear took me to very interesting mental and emotional places. Weirdly no one close to me died during the beginning of pandemic (my grandfather died from lung cancer a few months before covid was really known).
It wasn’t until I started grad school. On my first day class my great aunt (grandmother’s sister, the same one I had confused on the phone) who was living with us just a few weeks before this, passed away. We were close and we cared about each other and spent a good amount of time together, especially after my grandma died because we also had similar interests. I would speak with her on the phone regularly. I remember having to go to class, even though I really didn’t want to. I felt a lot of pressure to go because people were previously very dismissive about the volume of deaths I experienced and mourned previously and I definitely felt maligned for “mourning too much”. I was also somewhat determined to have a good time at grad school, however this felt like an omen at the time of what was to come. I remember feeling absolutely miserable that first day and pretty much the rest of the semester and year. I struggled a lot in school because I missed so many people but especially my great aunt who kept part of the life of my grandma alive through our chats and through her life. It is hard to do well when you’re mourning.
At this point the first three chairs in this collection were designed as I had launched my furniture company. As well as some other pieces that haven’t made their way to the light yet. Over the subsequent years a linty of people would die in my life with total number of deaths by the time the collection being finished reaching nearly 15 in about 7 year timespan. None of these people died from Covid and not all of these people were older and sick, it was a mix young and old. They were all people I had known for years and were in some way, shape, or form part of community at various points of life. Although each person died in a different way, all of the deaths kept me in a state of mourning (some dragging me deeper and deeper), which kept me thinking and reflecting. I remember craving hugs often, wanting support, and reprieve from everything. The amount of loss I was navigating in such a short amount of time on top everything else in life was reaching a fever pitch. I felt the numbness that begin when I nearly died growing larger and hungrier— consuming me from the inside out. All of the feelings, thoughts, and questions I had influenced and shaped the formal development of this collection. It was initially and ultimately inspired by my late paternal grandmother but all of the other deaths over the years also influenced the development.
I knew early on I wanted to do a collection of twelve because that felt practical and was an easy decision to make. Twelve felt like a nice number that could be broken down to fit a variety of seating arrangements. I knew I wanted to use combs because they fit in with the things my grandmother collected; had personality, emotion, and intentionality behind the design; and an object of care. They were also much like grief something everyone becomes familiarized at some point become and within some capacity. I knew I wanted to constrain the collection in some way (although this desire is discarded in 3 chairs), to reflect the constraint of genetics in a family which is sometimes broken by nature or choice. I didn’t know at the time, I would break this constraint until the end and reviewed all of the chairs to curate the collection. I really tried to keep the constraint of the seat and seat height but ultimately it felt a little too restrictive and unrealistic given the complexities of life, death, and family. I knew I wanted the collection to diasporic and not directly be tied to a single place because family isn’t tied to one place, it spans continents. Places wax and wane in importance depending on the lives of the people involved and what they are drawn to and what draws them. This was also a nod to my globetrotting grandma. I knew I wanted these to be dining chairs because I spent nearly every holiday and many random meals at my grandma’s house because she really loved to cook and there were never enough chairs. I knew I wanted this collection to feel eclectic because that’s how her house felt at times but it also felt cohesive. The chairs are a containment of multiple lives and lifespans. I knew that I wanted to blur the boundaries between art object and functional chair to blur and ultimately remove a larger line. Even now as I talk about the chairs it is in a way that is somewhere between a journal entry and more formal analysis of the chairs as Art. They are collectible but highly functional pieces designed to last multiple lifetimes and be passed.
I knew ultimately I wanted to explore ideas, questions, and desires I had around family and community. I intentionally removed the lines between family and friend for many reasons. One my grandma was a pillar in her neighborhood. She was very involved and supported many people during her life both at work as a nurse but more covertly in her personal relationships. Two, I think the capitalistic structures that control our society, erode the natural social fabric of humanity, and isolate us from forming deeper connections with each other. Additionally, the simple fact that you cannot nor should not rely entirely on blood family, and there is an over emphasis and weight given to “immediate family” (this isn’t a dig at my immediate family fyi, I am close with them however I saw how close and important my grandmother was to so many people she was not blood related to and see this as well in my friendships). Bereavement is rarely allocated to people other than immediate family, which is not reflective of the complexity of human relationships. People that hold importance to you, may not qualify you for support to mourn their loss, which is a weird overstep. Three, spending pretty much the entire death period physically away from my family, I relied a lot on friends to help me through the time. Those relationships, as well as my grandmother’s actual funeral shaped a lot around the overall feeling I wanted the chairs to imbue, individually and collectively. I wanted the chairs to feel like toned down exaggerations of personalities, akin to characters in a play or movie. They each needed to offer support in different ways reflecting the varying degrees of support I received in my life during this period and now. Our roles are different in everyone’s life one, we are not the same person to everyone just as these chairs do feel and support the same to every body. There is no one perfect chair, each one has visual and emotional strengths and weaknesses exploring a different type of physical support through design. Chair No.11 is relaxed, allowing the sitter rest their arm in the petals/waves of the back. Chair No.9 is rigid and protective, protecting the heart of the sitter and reminding them to sit with pride. Chair No.10 is exposing, I couldn’t have made this collection without feeling exposed and open to exploring the grief I was experiencing. Chair No.1 is reliable, it is the textbook definition of perfect support not too much, not too little. Chair No.2 is fun and futuristic, processing grief you have to remember the good times to less the bad. You have to hope things will get better. Chair No.5 is delicate, there were times I was so angry and hurt during this period so the support was delicate. Support cannot always be firm sometimes it has to be light and gentle, sometimes even as little as keeping an eye on someone and watching out for them, a bit like a guardian angel. Chair No.3 reminds us that support can be a lot of little things, catching us when we need it and showing up in different small ways.
As time went on I realized subconsciously the way in which I thought about support mirrored the different hugs I received. How each hug is different. How at different times I wanted hugs from specific people over others but that changed depending on my mood. I wanted to challenge viewers/buyers/sitters to think about how they interact with the things they buy, collect, and leave behind. Our homes are museums of our lives. Each item has a provenance and held some significance or connection to some moment or someone else. It’s all in dialog, reflecting and creating the larger story of our life. We all leave behind something because we quite literally cannot take anything with us; so what are we leaving behind for our loved ones, what do give them to remember us by? Physical mementoes anchoring memories? They all become things they have sort through while mourning, every object’s importance enhanced by the magnification of grief, loss, love, and wonder.
This collection was one of the hardest things I’ve finished, stalled and shaped by it’s origin grief. I’m glad it is finished in some capacity, and I cannot wait to continue to share it even if at times it is heavy.
