MFA Thesis: Changing Positions
Changing Positions
Most able bodied people engage in their daily routine unaware of the relative ease of moving through their physical environments. Standard furniture and architectural forms are designed to facilitate the comfort and productivity of typically shaped and typically equipped people in their home or work environment. However, not everybody’s needs are met by these standard specifications. After losing my leg in a motorcycle accident, my awareness of this inequitable reality was sharpened considerably.
Due in part to my personal circumstance, I developed a strong interest in how physical differences preclude some individuals from fully engaging in functional and joyful activities. In pursuit of this objective, I am exploring the power inherent in furniture design to restore an individual’s physical functionality, sense of independence and fuller inclusion in meaningful work and social engagement. I draw on my own personal history, and build works relevant to my experience of adaptation and acceptance.
My current body of work communicates a sense of my original physical trauma and subsequent loss of function, as well as shares my process of emotional and physical healing. These pieces are about being functional and comfortable over the course of a regular day and address the common physical actions of walking, sitting, and confronting stairs. The adaptive objects also represent the psychological effects of personal injury and limited mobility, and the subsequent need for physical and emotional stability.
These pieces show various means of adaptation by using familiar furniture types morphed by circumstance and necessity. The aesthetic languages of furniture, tools, architecture, and prosthetics are combined and transformed into hybrid objects that suggest solutions that better facilitate these common actions. I utilize the anthropomorphic qualities inherent in furniture to abstract the destruction some people have sustained to their bodies. It is my hope that by addressing our physical differences and by appreciating the needs of people with lesser physical ability, the landscape of objects and architecture can be made more accommodating. My work affirms the rights of unique persons to fully realize a participatory and purposeful life.
Tool for Standing
2014
15" X 14" X 36"Steel, Carbon Fiber, Rosewood, Brass. $2600 Most people expect to be able to easily accomplish simple domestic tasks. However, many of these tasks require a standing body position. Standing for long periods of time can be difficult for some. This work is designed to be a stationary prosthetic for me to stand in at home, thus returning to me functional activities otherwise lost. |
Cabinet Support
2014
12" x 8" x 33" White Oak, Porcelain, Brass. $1900 Referencing the built in cabinets and top mount sink in my apartment’s bathroom, this cabinet also serves as a support for me to rest my right leg on. The custom shape allows for a safer more comfortable shave. |
Prosthetic Stool
2015
12" x 10" x 22" Leg, Seat. $1800 Prosthetic Stool is the most concentrated distalation from my thesis show. I have returned function to a discarded prosthetic knee and foot through the attachment of a seat from an old bike. The new hybrid form serves quite well as a stool. |
Memories Up Stairs
2015
160" x 50" x 110"Concrete, Poplar. $NFS Almost every office, school, hospital, and apartment building have stairs at the center of its circulation pattern. People with physical disabilities frequently have difficulty negotiating stairs and thus are limited in their ability to fully participate in active society. I have chosen to represent this loss of active function with a fractured and non-functional run of stairs leading to nowhere. The details are from my memories of the traditional residential stairs of my home in New England. |
Restructured Chair
2015
24" x 19" x 43" Ash, Fire, Bleach. $2800 Built as a self-portrait, this chair was designed and built as complete functional piece of furniture and then subjected to destructive action. After a portion was burned away, a second structural system was used to restore the piece to function. The restructuring returns function but requires the object to be used differently then before. |
Climbing Seats
2015
120" x 27" x 76" Ash, Red Oak, Steel, Rubber. $9500 Functionally Climbing Seats is a construction for raising oneself from one level to another without the use of stairs. This piece was constructed using the languages of tools, architecture and furniture. It was made mobile as an acknowledgement that we all carry our baggage around with us. |
Standing Wedged
2015
25" x 26" x 45" Walnut, Leather, Steel. $4800 An experiment in body position, “The Wedge” is designed to hold someone in a nearly standing position with minimal use of muscles in their lower body. Stability and balance require greater concentration by a disabled person. The method of additive construction recalls the assembled quality of prosthetics. |
Sitting at Six Feet
2015
50" x 22" x 52" Red Oak, Leather, Steel, Rubber. $5200 In a culture of active people the ability to perform work is prized. Having an eye to eye conversation in a position of readiness is symbolically meaningful. Sitting in a room of standing people can cause the seated person to feel of diminished social value. This pieces takes a chair, built to standard seat height, and elevates it so that my eye level is the same seated as it would be standing. |
Frozen Emotions
2014
14" x 14" x 35" Aluminnum, Wax. $9800 After the motorcycle accident that took my right leg, I spent nearly a year in hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, and with visiting nurses in my family home. This sculpture is a physical manifestation of the emotions I was experiencing during that period of isolation. The passage time moved at a glacial pace and my feelings over the loss of prior activities were keen. |