INSPO FOR FURNITURE

Well you need a chair in a bedroom…

To allow this room to come to life in its full potential, I am looking at various ways I can make a chair with a personality. In surrealism, we often see that objects come to life to defy the expectations of the everyday life. I wanted to create a personified chair giving it character. As shown below, I am seeing what designs come to mind and drawing them fluidly, erasing any thought of “this might be too weird” or “not functional” – the weirder, the better.

There are particular images that were central to the Surrealist movement. The human hand, for example, became a frequent Surrealist motif and can be seen in the movement’s films, paintings and photography. Why were these motifs so important to Surrealism and why do we continue to discuss them as part of the movement’s history? To understand why we must look to the Surrealist films of the 1920s, specifically Un chien andalou (Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, 1928) and L’Age d’Or (Buñuel, 1930) and how key scenes emphasised the reoccurring themes that were so central to this movement. The repetition of hands in Un chien andalou is, to put it simply, a symbol of fetish: what hands can do and how they can generate both intense pleasure and intolerable pain. Williams has commented that ‘the function of the fetish arises from the fear of castration’ and can only be preserved through making the object in question a symbol of fetish. The repetition of wounded and severed hands in the film represents castration fear, and more specifically, a disembodied phallus. This is emphasised when we realise that all the hands, whether injured or exuding ants, are male.

At the moment I am looking at associating the fetishistic ideology behind hands with the human body by creating a hand-shaped chair for the audience to sit on. As well as making it an interactive piece of art that makes it truly feel like a bedroom, it introduces the world of surrealism and context to the symbols that were being used at that time.