“Exploded Chair” are furniture pieces that toy with conventions. Created by Joyce Lin, the series embrace play whilst maintaining functionality.
This is, perhaps, nowhere more evident than in her “Exploded Chair“, a piece she designed in her final year at Rhode Island School of Design. This piece takes traditional conception of what a chair is, dismantles it, and places it in clear perspex containers. The maple-wood chair that sits loosely within its crystalline sarcophagus looks much like the archetypal kitchen seat. As the “Exploded Chair” is moved, its wooden pieces rattle around inside their compartments.
I made parts of a wooden spindle chair and encased them in plexiglass acrylic. The parts are loose in their compartments, allowing them to shift around when the chair is moved. This emphasizes both the joinery of the parts and the form as a whole, embodying a state of both connection and disconnection. The piece is both familiar and disorienting, playful and disconcerting — a dichotomous piece on which to seat yourself.
Joyce Lin is an artist and designer passionate about making interactive sculptures and functional objects as a mode of exploration and play. She works with a wide range of mediums including wood, metal, plastics, and upholstery to create surrealistic objects that explore questions about material and form and the ever-shifting relationship between humans and their environment.
All images Joyce Lin
