In his book The Soul of a Tree, George Nakashima laid bare his deep kinship and reverence for nature, describing a tree’s nobility and its new life at the hands of a human. This philosophy was not just revealed in his designs, but extended to his furniture manufacturing methods. An experienced woodworker from his time in India, it wasn’t until 1942 in an internment camp for Japanese Americans that he learnt traditional Japanese carpentry skills.
The NGV’s newly acquired Conoid, bench, 1966, is an embodiment of Nakashima’s ethos. While most woodworkers prefer to work with a straight-grained timber, Nakashima desired timber with unusual and disrupted grain, such as you’d find when sawing a log with a branch crotch. The log would then be sawn ‘through and through’, revealing the timber’s full range of graining, minimising wastage, and keeping all the boards or slabs from one log together in the order in which they were sawn. After air drying for a couple of years, the slabs might then be briefly kiln dried prior to being transformed.
Nakashima’s designs honour the tree in many ways, such as his leaving what he coined a ‘free –edge’, – where the slab edge is debarked but left as it grew in nature. Likewise, what would normally be described as faults in timber such as knots, splits or areas of rot are instead retained as features. Nakashima was essentially working with nature’s revealed design rather than imposing only his own.
Wooden butterfly keys (butterfly or bow-tie shaped pieces of timber) are a feature of Nakashima’s furniture, used both decoratively and functionally to span between panels or reinforce a weak area. This follows a long tradition of visible mending and honouring the life or materials of objects in Japanese culture that includes kintsugi, the repairing of ceramics with lacquer putty and gold powder, or the interest in boro textiles, with their patched and stitched repairs.
Conoid, bench is representative of Nakashima’s desire to work with nature, not against it, and to reveal the hidden beauty and ‘fallen majesty’ of the mighty walnut tree it was created from.
Suzi Shaw, NGV Conservator, Frames and Furniture