LETTING DWELL Tim Larkin, Peter McColl, Luke Feast

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Tim Larkin - Folk Furniture (detail)

LETTING DWELL: Tim Larkin, Peter McColl, Luke Feast
16 February – 10 May 2009 / FREE ENTRY
TheNewDowse / 45 Laings Road Lower Hutt
TheNewDowse / 45 Laings Road Lower Hutt
www.newdowse.org.nz

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

In 2007 furniture designer Tim Larkin began to explore a creation familiar to many New Zealand homes – the food safe. Larkin won the 2008 Deane Award for Decorative Arts and Design with an exhibition proposal based on this highly-efficient yet increasingly-redundant storage facility.

The food safe is a bridging point between the interior and exterior of a house, with permeable barriers to keep bugs and rodents out, but keep cooling air in. Occupying an ambivalent space between furniture and architecture, inside and outside, exposure and protection, the concept of the food safe opened up “some curious questions” for Larkin and his collaborators in LETTING DWELL - photographer Peter McColl and writer Luke Feast.

In his food safe-inspired cabinets, Larkin creates evocative spaces through contrasting layers of organic, hand-crafted and machine-worked materials. Bringing digital laser precision to a traditional craft-based process, Larkin seeks to remind us of a time when our bodies were more engaged with the natural world outside the built structures we live and work in.

Peter McColl uses still and moving cameras to explore duration, inhabitation and desertion, echoing forms present in Larkin’s work – jagged edges, lines of sticks, and the broken passage of time. Meanwhile, Luke Feast questions the limits of writing philosophically about ‘making’, by considering the dynamic between the craftsperson and material reality.

As Larkin says, “The test of the cabinets is whether they are able to evoke a sense of occupation within another space and perhaps another time. Can the cabinets take me back to our food safe at Okaihau or to the cool dryness of being under a house and looking out at my father?”

Larkin will lead a free floor talk through LETTING DWELL on Sunday 22 March, from 11am – 12 noon.

ENDS

Tim Larkin
Tim Larkin is a Wellington-based furniture designer. He has a Master of Design with Distinction from Victoria University of Wellington (2004), and has taught design at Victoria University, Massey University and the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology.

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