Most woodworkers join or carve their wares from cut timber. Some glue and bend it. Few grow their own.<\/p>\n
But since the early 2000s, that is exactly what Gavin Munro, an English artist and trained furniture designer, has been trying to do. One April morning, Munro and his wife, Alice, took a video call from two deck chairs in their \u201cchair orchard,\u201d just over an acre of green land in the Peak District. With a nurse\u2019s care and attention, the pair, who are known professionally as the design collective Full Grown, have planted generations of common British hedgerow trees (willow, hazel, sycamore, ash, hawthorn, oak, apple) then experimented with shaping them into variations on a Shaker dining chair.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a bit of art, it\u2019s a bit of design, it\u2019s a bit of horticulture,\u201d Gavin Munro said. \u201cThere is this kind of element of now accepting that it could be any of these things at any moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Aztec Chair, a piece by Full Grown 16 years in the making, is among the works included in the Sarah Myerscough Gallery<\/a> presentation at TEFAF New York<\/a>, running May 15 through May 19. For the fair, Sarah Myerscough, the London-based gallery\u2019s founder and creative director, who has specialized in art, design and craft since 1998, has brought together 25 crafted pieces by 13 makers.<\/p>\n These artisans include Asako Sato, known as Arko<\/a>, a Japanese artist who uses straw in a kind of experimental thatching, the English ceramist Luke Fuller<\/a>, who makes stratified stoneware, and Adi Toch<\/a>, a London-based smithy who delicately hammers metal and polishes it to a mirror sheen. What all share is uncommon patience, a collaborative bond with nature and a singular drive to push their chosen material far beyond any normal bounds \u2014 and then delight in what they discover.<\/p>\n As Myerscough put it in a recent interview about the artists toward whom she gravitates, \u201cthese materials have had a past, and they\u2019re creating a new present for them.\u201d<\/p>\n Last fall, Myerscough opened a renovated Victorian schoolhouse in Mayfair as an exhibition space. She said that she was also in the process of applying for charitable status for an educational foundation for crafted arts she is setting up. Speaking as she led a tour of the space in a pair of loose, black Issey Miyake trousers and pink Chlo\u00e9 woven platform sneakers, she displayed a sense of style as playful as her curatorial ethos.<\/p>\n \u201cI always get so bored of when I see these interior design spaces which are all beige,\u201d she said, describing how she oscillated \u201cbetween a Louis XIV interior\u201d and the rich, layered earthiness of the work she shows.<\/p>\n Cue gemstone paint choices for the walls (a burned red in the corridors; a strong blue in the downstairs bathroom) and big plans for a showroom in the basement. She wants a great big boardroom table, the best of the gallery\u2019s inventory, and \u201clots of velvet,\u201d she said. \u201cBecause that\u2019s what my fair interiors look like,\u201d she added. \u201cDark, theatrical, you know, cool spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n Visitors to the gallery\u2019s space at TEFAF New York will be greeted by Myerscough\u2019s signature maximalism. Her rich paint choices and dramatic lighting set the stage for the objets d\u2019art she hangs from the walls, the lighting fixtures suspended from the ceiling and the sculpted pieces perched on plinths. In different ways, they all speak to the abundance, the wonder and the entropy of the natural world.<\/p>\n Eleanor Lakelin<\/a>, a wood-turner based in London, will be showing four vessels made from tree burrs, those outgrowths in a trunk where a wound has healed over. Turning them on a lathe to hollow them out, she then carefully picks off the bark with dental tools to reveal the patterning beneath.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are 300-400 year-old trees,\u201d Myerscough said. \u201cTheir life story is told in that work, where they\u2019ve been damaged, how they\u2019ve protected themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n