An Essay by Fiona Sibley
Written as an introduction to the exhibition Pulling out all the Stops
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It is an interesting time for furniture, and for furniture makers. At a point when the mass production of furniture has reached market saturation, many buyers are left looking for something else - more direct, meaningful and simpler in origin than the production line that leads from overseas factory to shop floor. This isn’t the only wind of change: from food to clothing to furniture, our growing environmental awareness is fuelling a desire to know the source and ecological sustainability of what we buy, use and eventually throw away, and to consider the implicit value of things beyond their price tag. We’re faced with a changing landscape of consumerism, and within that picture, there is scope for makers to play a role in helping us reconnect with the roots of what we own, to understand how and why these things enter our possession.
One part of the design industry has recently responded to a demand for the exclusive, the unique or the one-off by inventing the artificial notion of ‘limited editions’, the so-called ‘design art’ of mass-produced furniture sold in restricted quantities at inflated prices. But there’s another reaction to this vogue, the very antithesis of this falsely engineered exclusivity. Instead, there is the growing generation of designers re-acquainting themselves with the making side of their industry, in order to create something, either in full or part, by hand. The work offered by this new generation of furniture makers is breathing new life into traditional techniques, showing the patience for making, refining and turning already beautiful natural materials into something valuable and useful, often to be sold locally. Established industrial designers, too, are expressing their desire to reconnect with the making process. In many sectors of the economy and culture, there is a thirst for this bigger picture, and it forecasts a renewed interest in well-made things.
Joe Pipal works as, and describes himself, a cabinetmaker, and this body of work reveals his focus on honing his craft skills in a contemporary context. Much of his practice is carried out as commissioned work, making furniture to fit a bespoke space or need, and working in this way has given him the space to exercise both design and making in tandem. The values of craftsmanship are, in counterpoint to our industrial norms, ‘slow’: each piece of work itself requires patience, but the end result contains the evidence of the hand, the single influence that selected and transformed the living materials into a finished object. Pipal is a thoughtful maker, who is concerned not only with his process, but also with the provenance and values of what he is creating. This is evident from this work, and the way he has approached it. Unlike a designer taking on a new material and experimenting with pushing it in new directions, the collection is a way for Pipal to gather some of his most practised methods and showcase them at their very best.
Pipal’s influences are typically international. He grew up in east London, one heartland of English furniture making, yet by the time he developed his interest in furniture those workshops were dying out. While rooted in his native city, Pipal’s skills have been collected globally; he is an enthusiastic connoisseur of American craft schools, where makers of various disciplines gather to learn, share and interrogate their craft practice. He reserves much of his praise for Charles and Ray Eames’ designs and more particularly, for their way of life and devotion to exploration and invention, creating the beautiful bent wood forms that he often deploys in his pieces. Around his workshop hang pictures of works by two godfathers of European modernism, Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier. These midcentury lines, at times organic, natural swooping and at others clean-cut and functional, can both be seen as influences on Pipal’s eloquent shapes. At heart, you see a maker continuing a long line of English craftsmanship, utilising the rich seam of fine skills enjoyed by preceding generations.
This is also a body of work that’s very much about showcasing the beauty of materials. With this collection, Pipal raises several points about materiality. These pieces furniture combine three main woods: reclaimed African wenge, English oak veneer and Mediterranean cork. This tells immediate stories: the exotic and the mundane, the reclaimed set against the new, a confection of varieties from geographically diverse sources, with contrasting properties. Furniture made from one material has a purity, whereas in bringing together different types, immediately the maker is bringing together several different textures and ideas.
Pipal explains in his own words his fascination for his raw materials, where his own supply has come from, its previous uses and how they are – in the case of cork, remembered as prosaic kitchen tiles when growing up in the 1970s - commonly perceived. This adds up to a reason for selecting these materials that is not just arbitrary, or influenced by fashion. In the case of using natural cork as a key decorative material, lending these cabinet doors a beautiful, earthy grain, Pipal is keen to advocate that this versatile, sustainable material has uses in a new aesthetic context. Similar proposals have been made by Jasper Morrison with a range of cork stools for Vitra, and by Tom Dixon where, as creative director for Artek, he is overseeing the use of sustainable bamboo as a suitable modern furniture material.
There can be few starting points for a body of work as thrilling to a maker as being gifted a bulk of dirty, reclaimed exotic hardwood, and then to discover its origin to be a building as historically important as London's old Baltic Exchange. A precious cargo indeed. Though such a find may seem rare, enthusiasts will attest that there are abundant supplies of used materials ready to be transformed, with no small investment of love and attention, to be given a new lease of life. (This will allow Pipal to sustain his practice in this vein.) In the case of the wenge, Pipal received a load that had been torn from the building, with bitumen and concrete chunks left clinging to this beautiful, almost ebony-dark wood. Seeing its potential, and designing pieces that would display the virtues of these modular tiles is only half the task: the other being the hard graft needed to clean and restore each floor tile to its original quality. In the case of such a special material, and to make a piece of unique furniture, the hundreds of hours needed to revitalise this valuable resource seemed worthwhile.
Pipal is not alone in engaging with used materials. While Piet Hein Eek may utilise a junk-aesthetic of rough-hewn timber to make his furniture, or Martino Gamper will play on the social values of reconfiguring old dining tables as a new piece of communal furniture, Pipal takes those materials and reworks them until they can be proudly presented with a polished new face, demonstrating that reused supply can have the beauty of virgin wood.
Growing up and now living and working in east London, Pipal is a metropolitan maker, with an aesthetic tuned towards a refined and distinctly modern, yet luxurious, use of wood. Pipal’s practice is connected to both industrial and craft traditions, and this shows in his esteem for Reliance Veneers, his oak supplier and one of the last companies keeping the Lea Valley’s industrial furniture heritage alive in this country. From this end of his spectrum of interests, right through to the other, which sees him gathering old wine corks from the St John restaurant in Spitalfields, he is creating connections between different sectors, based on common uses for these materials. Gathering up strands of history by choosing materials, then using them to generate new associations, is at the heart of what a good maker does, using the exquisite manipulation of tools and techniques.
Pipal knows that cabinetmaking, like any other craft discipline, is about having a specialism and improving on its practice until it reaches perfection. There is a sense in this work that Pipal values the tacit knowledge in his practice, his techniques, processes and materials coming together and being put to good use in the creation of something functional, meaningful and – crucially – of a value that will be enjoyed for a long time.
This essay is from the booklet Cork, Oak and Wenge, which accompanied the work for the exhibition Pulling Out All The Stops. Download a pdf version of the booklet here