Almost Thonet

Almost Thonet is a hand-sculpted almost-replica of the bentwood Thonet Chair No. 14. It is part of an ongoing series that use objects as a way of thinking about form, material and meaning and the act of remaking as a means of transformation.

The original logic of the chair’s bentwood construction is obliterated by white putty. This reveals its own fabrication process through traces of thumb-marks and fingerprints. The material has a kind of generic non-material materiality which is part of the transformation of the chair into something which has qualities both of a real thing and a model of that thing simultaneously.