Skreeworld current projects

When I began Skreeworld my furniture had become a small consideration of mine. Something I did to make a living. I focused on my interest in urban adventure. We travelled out to water towers, entered subterranean tunnel networks under box tunnel, photographed and scaled industrial buildings.  But as urban exploration took off, blogs sprang up from serious urban explorers. I began to study my more immediate environment. Drain covers, wild flowers and other everyday ephemera that punctuate the day became the focus. Still, most followerers knew me from the furniture. After my descent in to and recovery from madness I decided to include the furniture. I accepted that this was what I did. My early hopes to make a living from my more experimental work met the realisation that this would always entail compromise some where. My close friend Gareth Neal does teaching work allowing him to only have to take on specialist work. Fred Baier, another close friend was a great influence on me. Not in the style of his work. This being so close to him as to be part of him, an extension of his mind. No, he allowed me to believe in making without a client. Prior to this realisation it had seemed as pointless as having sex on your own.
But all the speculative work became expensive vanity projects. I had to think about others and their wants and needs. My practice, through the good fortune of a patron wanting entire houses of my furniture throughout changed to making commissions and commissions are by nature for the eyes of others.
These days I am finding I can continue the commission pieces and still make art. I use the term art to mean autonomous creations. These do sometimes end up as furniture. There is something about the scale and it's relationship to the body. Last few weeks have been spent in the company of glass artists. Most of them make or have objects made in hot and cold glass studios. There is a limit in size to pieces that can be made. Yes, of course you can build up huge chandeliers as Dale Chihuli does but single component works are rarely bigger than a human head or a human forearm. They can sit on a table as a centre piece. Furniture though is intimately related to the body. Not just chairs but virtually all furniture. Even when I make. Art it tends to be of the same scale as furniture.
Currently, as you can see from recent postings I am making a series of bedroom furniture in yew and ash. Alongside this I am working on a chair in lead crystal amd wood. There is also the trailer I am supposed to be working on. I may, through this, get to build my dreams hack in the woods.
Looking at London based makers it is easy to see and understand the aesthetic conversations they are involved in. There are a wider diversity of 'conversations' taking place in art circles but within furniture the aesthetic that began around the millennium continue to dominate. A simple colour free style, often whites or natural tones. The use of irony and secondary meaning. Outside of London there is the woody type of furniture. This conversation has a focal point at Cheltenham. To make your own path as Fred does for example, requires exceptional vision that few have. Making work unrelated to others is very rare. Most artists are engaged with some sort of framework of values, a conversation within which their works make sense. Outsiders are often ridiculed. Their work is uncool, or occasionally may find a resonance with contemporary culture but these moments may be few and far between. It can be argued that there is little sense in making work with no 'conversation' around it, it can be seen as anti communal, selfish. Yet it is sometimes these artists that cause a paradigm shift.