Crafting Furniture From Wool
Life & Work of Liam Lee
Contemporary collectible design is easily recognizable by its distinctive processes, materials, and otherworldly quality that differentiates from high street furniture. I first came across Liam Lee’s felted chairs at Salon Art & Design fair in New York City, presented by Patrick Parrish Gallery in 2021. I was taken by the landscape of the surface of this chairs – a process that is clearly meticulous and incredibly unique.
Lee, an artist and designer based in New York, studied English Literature at the University of Chicago and graduated in 2015. He began working with felted wool fiber in his textile work since 2018 and shortly after that, began selling them through the Noguchi Museum shop. It started as a side project from work he had picked up in set design for fashion photography, Lee tells us, “When the pandemic hit and the fashion industry shut down, I began experimenting with creating more 3-dimensional, sculptural forms. That eventually evolved into furniture. Wool is an incredibly seductive and malleable material in that it can be both supple and rigid, depending on the density of the felt.”
Lee concerns himself with the dissolution of the boundaries between interior and exterior spaces. As is clear with his designs, his chairs showcase a collaboration between the man-made object and natural environments and landscapes of his imagination.
Using merino wool, Lee’s process involves dyeing and then sculpting the wool with felting needles. An extremely labor intensive process, Lee’s furniture takes several months to complete. The felted wool is grafted onto a simple wooden frame. Because needle felting is an additive process, Lee will add more material to slowly sculpture the fibers as a his vision takes shape.
Lee’s work is functional (you can definitely sit on them), but he approaches each piece as sculpture. “I noticed that I could continuously build up volume on my textile pieces and wanted to find a way to translate that sculptural element to furniture. It took a lot of trial and error to figure out how to best use felted wool as a structural component in functional pieces.”
Lee’s work has been shown by Patrick Parrish Gallery at Salon Art & Design, and at Fog Design + Art, by Objective Gallery at Nomad Circle and Art021 Shanghai (upcoming), by Kazerne in Eindhoven, NL, and at Make Hauser and Wirth (upcoming). His work can be found at the Noguchi Museum shop, and in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.
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