Work

Commissioned for the website Various Small Fires in 2013. 

A photographer’s wagon stands stock-still, arrested in the midst of a long drag across the wide-open reaches of America. Four mules – famous for their bloody-mindedness – have swerved from their trajectory, doubling back along their plodding tracks. The wagon’s U-turn is marked in a great double sweep along the ground, a double swathe of sand displaced by the wooden wheels.

As published in Disegno, 23 June 2017

For about four decades now, on occasion, members of the design community have been receiving a slim black volume tucked into their morning post... The latest is a masterpiece.

Written for a publication associated with an exhibition at Raven Row, London, entitled “Unto This Last”– a title borrowed from John Ruskin.  

Originally published in Afterall magazine in 2013.

Commissioned by Artforum, this review never saw the light because of publishing reschedules. It is presented here for the first time.

In the annals of overlooked artists, Grebenak is an extreme case. Working in an era when art world acceptance was hard to come by for women even in the best of circumstances, she doubled her marginality by choosing a medium that was relegated firmly to the “minor” arts. In the end, her work would be almost entirely erased from art history

There is an astonishing scene in the new documentary Do Not Resist, in which an enormous military vehicle drives slowly down a side street in a Wisconsin suburb. It is thickly armored, the color of desert sand, and the size of a tank—or for that matter, nearly the size of the houses it rolls past

Published in Crafts Magazine in 2016, in response to the exhibition Radical Craft at Pallant House.

London designers Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard are deeply invested in material experimentation as a way of generating form. My monographic book on their work, surveying their career from the couple’s first meeting at Central St. Martin’s through to the their most recent work, is published in 2017 by Skira.  Following is an excerpt to the volume’s introduction.

Commissioned by curator Brendan Cormier of the Victoria and Albert Museum for 'Values of Design,' published on the opening of the V&A Gallery in Shekou, China.

Composed on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the American glass movement, which began in Toledo in 1962, a version of this text was presented as a lecture at the Glass Art Society Conference in 2012. A published version followed in the GAS Journal.

Art in the Making: Artists and Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing is a collaborative book project, written together with Julia-Bryan Wilson. Coming at the topic of art-making from two different directions – myself from craft studies, and Julia from postwar art history – we argue for the interpretive relevance of production. Moving from seemingly obvious topics like painting and woodworking to distributed authorship methods, like the hiring of fabricators and online outsourcing, we consider various ways of making art and the impact that productive decisions have on aesthetics and meaning.

In 1919, Marcel Duchamp presented his patron Walter Arensberg with a small quantity of air. It was contained inside a blown glass ampule, which he had purchased from a pharmacist, and was labeled: 50cc of Paris Air.  

The favorite punching bag of American furniture scholarship is elitism—the historical preference for objects made for the wealthy. Yet, scholars often focus on extraordinary pieces of furniture for a good reason: because they seem to have more to say. 

Gousse Bonnin and George Anthony Morris were manufacturers of the most self-conscious stripe, their every maneuver calculated for effect. So why did they think that stylish Philadelphians would want a scientific-quality model of marine life in the middle of their well-set tables?