Tables, Occasionally - Essay by Kate Rhodes
The occasional table is that object of furniture that loiters in hallways, spare nooks, at the back of the room. It’s not that the occasional table isn't useful, more that its undefined role sees it always lying in wait. Functionless before being called on, the occasional table, once engaged, is applauded for its convenient, multifunctional character.
Occasional Tables, by Roderick Sprigg, is an exhibition of five tables made by five pairs of fathers and sons. In the small town of Mukinbudin, 300km east of Perth,Sprigg set up materials and tools in a work shed and provided the invitations for this making to take place. Although not the creator of these pieces of furniture on display, Sprigg is an arranger of situations – suggesting a new tactic for thinking about craft practice.
Before these particular occasional tables become those objects that move in and out of function, they have already been injected with their role. In Sprigg’s exhibition the act of their creation is the same act that makes meaning and gives these tables their intent. While not involved in their construction, Sprigg’s position as facilitator of table building is also one of a kind of relationships officer.
That is, the activity of table construction is entirely the point of their existence and any utility in the completed tables is secondary to the physical act of collaborative creation between father and son. This is made plain to us as gallery visitors, not expressly in the tables themselves, but in the videos and texts that accompany them so that we can ‘return’ to the scenario that bore this furniture.The finished tables have both a conceptual function and a pragmatic function.
They show how meaning can be re-thought when we question an object’s purpose. Significantly, these tables also suggest how function can mediate social interaction and interrelations. It’s an effect, seen most publicly in The Katrina Furniture Project, formed in response to Hurricane Katrina. These organised furniture-making workshops use the debris left by the storm and ultimately assist in the growth of the economic and social facility of neighborhoods in New Orleans that experienced social and financial challenges even before Katrina. The workshops make and sell church pews, tables and stools, all from recycled wood.
Craft and design have a special ability to explore the nature of function and to exploit its expressive potential – given that use-value sits at the core of these practices. And as a gallery dedicated to craft, Craft Victoria is an important place to explore these different levels of function (and non-function) as it challenges all that might have been held dear to this area traditionally. Function helps us to understand ourselves in relation to craft objects and those objects that seem to be functionless throw up new strategies for us to consider. Sprigg’s exhibition of occasional tables capitalises on this unsure state of design.
Kate Rhodes
Kate Rhodes, Curator at the National Design Centre, Melbourne.
