Chair

Influential artist Stephen Hogbin began working with wood in the 1950s, though he did not begin turning wood until 1971, shortly after he emigrated to Canada. The stack-laminate furniture of Wendell Castle from the 1960s, represented by the three-seat settee in this gallery, inspired Hogbin to use the same material, though their approaches differ. Where Castle uses carving tools to shape the rough stack-laminate construction into furniture, Hogbin uses a lathe he built from a truck axle, mounted on a steel frame. For this chair, he carved grooves in a disc of wood seven feet in diameter and one foot thick while it spun on the lathe. He then cut apart the disc and reassembled the layers into a new form. Hogbin calls these reassembled forms fragmentals.