Form Follows Fiction: Expressive Furniture
SnailShelf (Beverly) by Miles Gracey, 2025. Walnut with brass hardware, handcarved wood, 5½" x 9½" x 21".
Objects in the home are not only witnesses to our daily routines, they are active participants in our domestic lives. Furniture, then, has the unique position of representing and performing personal tableaus. Through sculptural processes including hand and power carving, tool demonstrations, individual and group experimentation, and other mark-making processes, this workshop builds upon the latent storytelling ability of furniture. Together, we will expand upon ornamentation, form, function, and affect as meaning-making strategies in expressive furniture and poetic woodworking, resulting in individual and (questionably) useful narrative objects. All levels welcome.
Miles Gracey (he/him) is a woodworker located in the Hudson Valley, NY. He uses sculptural furniture to build and expand upon narratives within domestic spaces, blending personal stories with fictions to create scenes both functional and fanciful. Through the use of ornamentation, material exploration, and craft, he finds allegory and metaphor in the artifice of adornment. Gracey received an MFA in Furniture Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art, a BFA in Sculpture/New Genre from Otis College of Art and Design, and a two-year woodworking degree from The Krenov School of Fine Furniture.