Gregory Beson

I designed and crafted Flock, a set of chairs that raise awareness of how humans use the resources of the natural world. Made with sheepskin, sheep bone, and sheep blood, the chairs explore the way materials are used and distributed in contemporary furniture production, and design. Flock was conceived as a resource for discussion, user self-reflection, and learning. Skal is a stool, a piece of assemblage furniture created from IKEA products. It is designed to draw attention to the differences and parallels between two industrially produced materials: plywood from an IKEA FROSTA stool and the RENS sheep pelt. Terrosso is a cast and hand-sculpted chair composed of bone meal and broken bone fragments, both of which are waste from the industrial slaughterhouse industry, and a urethane binder. Unum is based on the oldest-known chair design, which cannot be accurately credited to any one region or culture. To create the piece, two book-matched slabs of black walnut wood are joined with a single woodworking lap joint. The artifacts that inhabit our lives are not merely form and function. They are part of the fabric of our world. Each one is a spool of thread that can be unraveled. In this way, each thing can be traced back to its source. A question can be posed: Was it worth the sacrifice?