Spotlight on V&A Furniture collection

the VNA has been collecting furniture made in the West for over 150 years and its collections are unmatched for quality and their breadth with 14,000 pieces ranging in date from medieval to contemporary one of the most impressive things about the collection is its amazing variety there are chairs tables and cabinets of course but also musical instruments clocks and mirrors beds and bookcases on the largest scale and on the smaller scale exquisitely made caskets in the museum's many permanent galleries of design you can find over 1,000 pieces of furniture many displayed alongside the other fine and decorative arts but one gallery is different in that it displays only furniture the dr. Susan Weber gallery tells the story of how furniture has been made and decorated for over 600 years and it's the only gallery of its type in the world the piece that the VNA purchased was called George it was based on a Georgian piece of furniture a chest of drawers where I've kind of combined the visual aesthetic of the chest of drawers with a kind of my take on a contemporary aesthetic which is much more straight and linear and then using digital manufacturing techniques CNC routing I've exposed the traditional form within the objects so it kind of reveals a kind of ghost of its past and then I've chiseled away and carve the weight so it kind of leads the viewer or the onlooker into the the traditional heritage of the object the George Chester drawers is just part of my broader inquiry into kind of reflecting traditional craft processes and recontextualizing them for a modern audience so whatever I design I try and grab hold of a traditional technique do something new and fresh with it and present it in a contemporary way to try and give craft techniques longer life the VNA has a rich and diverse collection of 19th century furniture including this washed and designed by Victorian architect William Burgess William Burgess was one of the most inventive and eccentric designers of his age as a younger man Burgess designed very elaborate painted furniture he was a romantic he retreated from the modern world into the Middle Ages he built his own house tower house in Holland Park from 1875 to 1878 the washstand was made by John Walden a carpenter in London in 1880 it's made of carved wood you can see this very delicate carving and inlays of mother-of-pearl along the top and then these rather nice beveled mirrored sections across the upper part very finely cut and sparkling and then around that you have the carving of the highest quality you have the plants what looked like lizards and butterflies and their gilded and also painted tinted the bronze taps resemble animals and silver coin copper and lead into the wash Bowl which is made of marble Burgess believed that medieval furniture in his own words not only did its duty as furniture but spoke and told a story this screen was made in about 1923 by the Irish born designer and architect Eileen gray when she finally moved and settled in Paris in about nineteen seven she met and studied with the Japanese lacquer artists so Jose Kawara and before long she's established a reputation as a very successful practitioner in Makkah it's a combination of the standard lacquer technique that you see in all her work previously but instead of the stylized figurative approach she's created a whole sequence of totally abstract planes which each one of them or each section of them is made made up in a different way and all of different materials there is there are silver rectangles here which look tarnish but this is a deliberate effect that she wanted and this is something which is so fascinating about Eileen Gray because she's forever experimenting she never just sticks to the one safe way of treating lacquer or wood or Chrome or anything that she continued to make but there's always this something very relaxing about this lacquer comes from the SAP of a tree have grown all over Asia and when it's first produced lacquer can create a very shiny and glassy surface and the problem with lacquer is over time it can be very susceptible to damage from light the viene we use a variety of treatments to treat the degraded like a surface we can also use the lacquer itself to treat the lacquer surface and that way we can preserve the decoration on that surface and stop it deteriorating more in the future I was moving into a new apartment on new flat bare walls and I needed to do some shelves looked at the wall and I did like that it would be nice to have a shelf that is just one line I did the first one that I have it I still have at home after all these years and after that we made some some more and we talked about doing this in an industrial way by extruding plastic and injection molding the brackets and you know the idea of it is that you buy it coiled in a box you take it home and you you take part in the design of it you desire the shape it's giving people the idea that yes they can be part of the process this writing cabinet is unusual in that one can honestly say but it's the most beautifully made piece of furniture in these galleries not only is the outside beautifully veneered in fine tropical hardwoods and decorated with the most exquisite gilt bronze mats but the actual structure of the cabinet is amazingly fine inlaid into this trellis work of marquetry are fanciful pictures of flowers and fruits inlaid in mother-of-pearl and brass for the gilt bronze we had to investigate and take on a new technique of cleaning which involved using dry ice and one of our conservators went off to learn this technique we hired in the equipment needed and the effect was absolutely magical the cabinet is really very carefully thought-out and even the keyholes are covered with little gilt bronze mounts of leaves that move to one side before you put the key in although we don't know who made the cabinet we do know who it was made for because inside the top is a carved cartouche with the monogram AR which is the monogram of Augustus the third even the internal drawers are beautifully veneered and what is most surprising and tremendously unusual is this these panels of snake wood in the center of the marquetry which was always a very very rare wood and particularly so in the eighteenth century and then set off by these gilt bronze mounts that are first cast and then chiseled to give this very fine reflective surface to the gilding one of the oldest complete pieces of furniture in the collection is this carved and painted casket probably made in the Netherlands in about 1370 the dating is based partly on analysis of the clothing and hair styles and we can see here very nicely the way that bright 4,000,000 glazes were used on the background and we get some sense of the way that gilding was used for almost all the clothing to create an extraordinarily sumptuous effect but the main scene on the casket is on the lid this tells the story of one of the most popular medieval romances it's the tale of his older and Tristram adulterous lovers at the court of her husband king mark the other scenes on the casket a lady taming a wild man a couple playing chess a full of significant gesture and gazing amplifying this romantic theme and suggesting that the casket itself was a betrothal gift that may have contained smaller presence a kind of luxury packaging if you like that was probably full of coded meaning for the couple of

Channel: Victoria and Albert Museum

Views: 121,628

Keywords: Furniture, design, manufacture, making, history, artefacts, conservation, materials

Id: 9RCjMEBjehg

Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 31 2016