PAIR: REPAIR

In 2022, Georgina joined a small group of designers and makers for a week long residency at the Sylva Wood School for the V&A’s Make Good Field Notes to explore practices around utilising locally grown timber.

Considering elements of access, care and participation, this project places the act of repair as a method for linking ecological infrastructure such as coppiced woodlands and social infrastructure such as community workshops.

Inspired by the community workshop in Bridport which promotes a donation-based repair offer to the public, her work suggests that the same voluntary, non-monetary transactions of coppice management in exchange for local timber be paired with a local resource for voluntary mending as an opportunity to engage with wood craft and learn from existing objects. Through partnering these two acts of cyclical maintenance, we may begin to cultivate an understanding of the natural cycles between the productive landscapes and the materials they produce, seeking to find a balance between the cycles of an object’s degeneration and the wood’s regeneration. 

THE PROJECT:


A chair in needing of maintenance, with snapped and loose joints, was brought from Dorset to Oxfordshire by train to receive care.

It was determined that the back leg and main seat back rung would need to be replaced.

New components were made with Robinia of a similar diameter, which was freshly cut on site and worked green using  basic hand tools which could be found in workshops much like the one in Bridport.

The cutting of the Robinia was it’s first rotation as coppice in a future of many more cycles to come- since its planting 5 years ago it had not been cut. The tree will not die from this but will be stimulated through its roots to regenerate new stems.

The average life expectancy of a modern wooden chair is around 10 years. These replacement parts took 5 years to grow, and in another 5 years will have grown many more in its place. Perhaps this chair too will have many more lives.

This project is a call to grow our objects more locally and to care for the consumption of materials as intrinsic to the sources from where they grow.

It’s also a call to create those infrastructures that are necessary to do so.