Throughout my educational and working life I’ve investigated the interplay of our material and transcendental exchanges with the world, asking in one way or another how manipulating the physical realm changes our outlook, perception, imagination and emotions. What is the relationship between our biological, mineral existence, like the movement of hemoglobin coursing out to our fingertips, and our feelings of peace, security, elation or dread? Where does the “it” end and the “I” begin?

As an undergraduate I studied both biology and philosophy, believing that systems of rational thought could provide answers to Modernity’s reverberant question of how one ought to live. I’m less committed to those modes of knowledge and that particular inquiry now. Instead, as the decades accumulate and dissolve, I realise that revelations are conditional and ephemeral, soon to be lost in this swimmer’s wake; I am always emergent, yet always immersed.

While studying architecture then working as a carpenter, I imagined, drew, spied on, and built shells for habitation. Finally, I settled on furniture as an elemental interface between a body, space, and time, comprised of the immediate physical now and everything else that envelopes it before and after. Furniture is where we and our things come to rest; or, in other words, furniture arrests us. By this I mean it locates us, positioning the body, but also, perhaps more importantly, orienting our mind’s focus, mood, outlook. Collecting Ourselves is the outcome of my PhD investigation into furniture as navigational aid for lives in transition, a series of structures offering opportunities for individual play and expression, and a resting place for the things we carry.