Furniture
The Furniture Workshop provides comprehensive skills-oriented courses of study for Undergraduate, Honours and Postgraduate students aimed primarily at those wishing to work as designers/craftspersons. Students are provided with a program which comprises real and hypothetical design briefs, and are encouraged to investigate all aspects of professional practice by making contact with established professionals, workshop and studio visits, and by workshop projects focussing on issues such as exhibiting and marketing work. As part of the ANU Faculty of Arts, with professionally active academic staff, advanced technical facilities, and located close to Australia’s national collecting institutions, the School of Art Furniture Workshop provides an excellent environment for study and research.
Workshop Projects
The art of the widening joint
Every work has a beginning. It has been said that a beginning is not only an action, but it is also a frame of mind, a kind of consciousness. To begin is to embark upon something connected to a particular point of departure - the beginning is the first step from which something follows: but curiously ‘beginnings’ also imply return and repetition: always we begin and begin again - always we see a difference.
The Making Hand
The hand in its cunning can itself can be a gauge: the hand with these little tools is part of the gauge………..the index finger curves over the top of the head: the thumb pressed against the head of the gauge powers the tool. The other three fingers curl over the stem behind and against the head and clamp the tool onto the hand: tool and hand are one.
Core Skills 1
Everything we teach must have a value of wholeness. Our medium begins in a tree: the tree grows by the laying down of cells that make up the fibers and supportive tissues of wood. This matrix holds the tree upright and gives it an internal transport system. The fibers give the wood its elemental strength and working character.
To make a three dimensional structure from wood, we interweave the substance of it; we interpenetrate the bundles of fibers of the components.
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Facilities
The Furniture/Wood Workshop
The Furniture/Wood Workshop is one of the smaller workshops at the School of Art. It can accommodate a maximum of 28 undergraduate and graduate students, giving each student his/her own bench and workspace. Upstairs there is a dedicated teaching room, where undergraduates are taught basic joinery skills and part time non-award students have classes. There is a small gallery space for solo exhibitions and for assessment presentations.
