make do chair — isabelrower

The Box works body of work started when I was approached to make a chair for Make-do, an exhibition Marta put together for New York Design week 2023 under the prompt of making a chair in 3 days or under. I looked around my studio and saw an opportunity to use all of the cardboard boxes that had accumulated over the past year. I had saved the cardboard shipping materials that delivered my clay, hoping a new use would one day present itself.

For this chair, I wanted to use the structures that held and delivered my material as the internal structure for the mold. The outside would become the inside, transforming the possibilities of each material. I first built a chair out of discarded cardboard and then covered it in red stoneware clay. The process of building the cardboard chair took about 2 hours. I then cut the clay into bricks and hammered them together with a wooden mallet enclosing the cardboard mold; this took around 4 hours. The clay dried out around the cardboard structure for four days. I then removed the internal mold and the clay was left standing as it’s shadow.

Box Chair, 2024. Stoneware. 25.0 × 20.5 × 24.5 in.